Strengthening GNOME Africa through Design and Launch of Local Chapters

Michael Downey, Regina Nkenchor

Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad

Problem Statement: The GNOME project is a globally acclaimed open source desktop environment & application ecosystem, provided for free to everyone. By creating an inclusive and sustainable desktop application that everyone can use, we aim to break down barriers to accessing technology, ensuring people from diverse backgrounds, especially those in low-income countries, can contribute to and benefit from the advantages of open source software and free desktop applications. With a burgeoning open-source community and untapped talent, Africa faces unique challenges in fully benefiting from GNOME. Limited resources hinder the establishment of a diverse and sustainable open source community in Africa. Due to inadequate digital collaborative infrastructure, there are few opportunities for local events. Adding to the challenge is insufficient documentation for Africans’ participation in GNOME, and the need to encourage more mentorship of potential contributors in low and middle income countries. To unlock Africa’s true technological prowess, we’re requesting pilot funding to launch local chapters of GNOME’s existing work in Africa. These funds will enable us to start creating localized and accessible desktop solutions that cater to the diverse needs of Africans. By promoting open-source principles and encouraging collaborative contributions, we envision a continent where people from all walks of life can participate to build and use free and open source desktop applications in everyday life.

Proposed Activities: This grant will allow the GNOME Africa team to launch local chapters that meet regularly and are well-integrated to our global community, will provide leadership and career skills growth for participants, and will provide opportunity to travel to engage face-to-face with the GNOME community around the world. Extend existing GNOME Africa documentation at https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeAfrica adding Local Chapter program materials, including mission, vision, and proposed scope for each local chapter. (No funding needed.) Work in conjunction with existing GNOME contributors to identify target cities, local leaders, and liasions with Open Source Community Africa (OSCA) network partner chapters in those cities. Hold group-based training sessions with local leaders to identify marketing needs from global GNOME Foundation, advertising and promotional strategy, and practical logistics (venues, food, schedules) for each local chapter. Launch chapters and promote them through GNOME and OSCA online resources and in-person events. Run local chapter events on a regular (e.g., monthly) schedule, monitoring attendance and event content. Provide funding to local chapters for event logistics (food and venue costs). Facilitate online discussion for local chapters through forums and chat. Iteratively improve online resources for local chapters, creating an online “handbook” for future forming chapters to use to launch. Conduct midpoint (8 months) and end-of-grant (16 months) evaluations of program particpants. The ultimate goal of our local chapters is to build long-term contributors around the continent who help make GNOME more useful for Africans in a variety of settings of daily life.

Openness: The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that believes in a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. We do this by building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. We believe that software should be developed in the open. Our development infrastructure and communication channels are public, and our code can be freely downloaded, modified, and shared with others. All our contributors have the same rights. As an organization building only free and open source software, everything we do is transparent and produced with open licenses. More specifically, program handbooks and training resources for the GNOME Africa Local Chapters will be published under Creative Commons (or other similar) licenses. Additionally, each local chapter will publish its meeting information on our GNOME.org website, including contact information for local leaders, event schedules, event summaries, videos, and resources from chapter events. Chapter meetings will be open to the public, and we will host chapter-based discussion areas in our global GNOME forums and chapter-specific chat rooms, allowing chapter attendees to communicate and network with each other between events.

Challenges: The most likely challenges we anticipate for this program is availability and engagement of local chapter leaders. As volunteers, those individuals may experience personal or external challenges in preparing, organizing, and facilitating local events. Further, there may be difficulties in securing venues and/or food providers for local chapter events. The budget requested here will help chapters cover costs for otherwise unsponsored venue or food costs. There is a small risk that co-funding from the GNOME Foundation would become unavailable. However, this proposal is being submitted by two Board members who are aware of the general financial situation and priorites of the Foundation, and we do not expect such a scenario barring unforeseen circumstances. We intend to take several mitigation steps to reduce the likelihood of these challenges. First, we have chosen the cities for our pilot program chapters based on locations we know has many existing GNOME contributors who have demonstrated their engagement with our community (who will likely become chapter leaders). Further, we plan to partner with Open Source Community Africa (OSCA) who over the past several years have launched a large number of successful local chapters for people interested generally in open source software. We hope to be able to coordinate dates and share cross-promotion activities with OSCA chapters, allowing people to easily participate in both groups.

Neglectedness: Although the GNOME Africa initiative has existed for several years, this will be the first dedicated funding for the program. More specifically, this is the first time we will be launching official chapters, first focusing on key cities for this pilot with the intention of creating a reproducible model that other local leaders can use to expand the program’s footprint after the pilot ends. We hope that the results of this pilot project will enable us to fundraise directly from the GNOME Foundation’s donors, as well as recruit local and global sponsors (businesses and/or NGO’s) for one or more local chapters, or for the entire program.

Success: Our success will be measured by the number of active chapters, the number of events held during the grant period, number of attendees for each local event, and through participant surveys at the midpoint and end of the grant period. We are looking for steady schedules of local events (ideally at least monthly), and steady or increasing attendance at those events. Further, we want to see attendees of local chapter events feel more connected to the global GNOME community and participate further as contributors of software code, design work, marketing, documentation, and other needs that our global community may express.

Total Budget: $24,816

Affiliations: This proposal is being submitted on behalf of the GNOME Foundation, a United States-based 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity. The Foundation leads the GNOME software project, an international project that aims to develop frameworks for software development, to program end-user applications based on these frameworks, and to coordinate efforts for internationalization, localization, and accessibility of that software. Our board is democratically elected, and technical decisions are made by the engineers doing the work. We are supported by many organizations; employees from over a hundred companies have contributed since the project began.

LMIE Carveout: This proposal is for pilot projects in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Kenya, all of which are currently classified as lower-middle income countries by the World Bank. Each group will be led by and will consist of residents of those countries.

Team Skills: The GNOME Foundation has deep experience throughout its community in organizing free & open source software development communities, and is one of the largest and longest-lasting communities of its type. Specifically, two Board Directors with extensive experience on open source software in LMIC’s are sponsoring this proposal. Michael Downey is our Board Secretary, was formerly the director of open source programs at the United Nations Foundation, and also has helped run the global OpenMRS community building health software for the global south. Regina Nkenchor is our Board Vice-President, founded the nonprofit OpenKids Africa to bring tech-focused open educational resources to young people, and has run our GNOME Africa program for several years. Both have spoken extensively at global conferences on the role of free & open source software in the global south. We’ll coordinate our chapters with Open Source Community Africa (OSCA), who organize a large number of vibrant local groups of open source enthusiasts throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. They also hold regular continent-wide conferences that attract many hundreds of attendees and international speakers. Each chapter will be matched with established international mentors from GNOME who will be available to remotely join meetings and guide local leaders and participants. Our partnership has the necessary skills to train a cohort of local leaders to connect interested people to the GNOME worldwide and support their journeys.

How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)

Submission Number: 116