Inclusivity of underrepresented and marginalized individuals is essential in software, and open source projects are no exception, and at the CHAOSS project, we support communities to adopt these diverse practices. The CHAOSS Africa Disability-Inclusion team hosted an outreach introducing open source to people with disabilities. Bridging Technology and Disability was hosted in Lagos, Nigeria, and organized by Brayan, Victoria, Winifred, and Peculiar. The event aimed to encourage people with disabilities to contribute to open-source and join the CHAOSS community in building more open-source projects.
Collaborations and Partnerships
The community collaborated with the Project Enable community to make this event successful.
The Project Enable community is a community that caters to people with disabilities directly. They provide their members with skill acquisition programs that aid them in self-reliance and employment opportunities.
The community provided the venue for the event. They also introduced the CHAOSS team to their community members, invited them to the program, and organized sensitivity training for the CHAOSS team. The sensitivity training was meant to prepare all participants for the event. The representative, a blind user, trained the speakers, volunteers, and the organizing team, orienting everyone on how to relate with people with disabilities, be respectful, and avoid ableism.
Accessibility Nigeria is another organization that partnered with this event. They are a community of accessibility enthusiasts who aim to bridge the gap between people with disabilities and society. They provided a few volunteers and some sponsorship.
Talk presentations at the event
The event was hosted by Yigakpoa Samuel. Amazing sessions were held in this event and they were delivered by members of the CHAOSS Africa community who have been actively making open-source contributions. Here is a recap of some of the sessions:
Keynote address – Community Health in Open Source Software
Speaker: Ruth Ikegah
Ruth shared her story about how she got into open source through curiosity, even without a computer science background. She also shared what we do at the CHAOSS project and how CHAOSS Africa started. She encouraged the participants on how they can make a difference in technology and open source regardless of their differences.
Open Source and Design
Speaker: Kingsley Mkapandiok
Kingsley started by defining open source and then a definition of open source design. He spoke about how to contribute, from finding a project to joining the community and then contributing. He spoke about CHAOSS and gave reasons why design is important as well as the benefits of contributing to open-source design. He also gave helpful resources.
Open Source Documentation
Speaker: Adeyinka Adesanya
Adeyinka started by defining open-source documentation and answering the following questions:
- “Why Documentation?”
- “When is documentation crucial?”
- “When to write open source documentation”
- “Where can Open Source documentation be found?”
- “How to get started contributing to open source docs”.
She also gave resources to aid intending technical writers.
Open Source Data Science
Speaker: Brayan Mwanyumba
Brayan gave his presentation virtually. He defined data science and gave reasons why the data science track should be contributed to. He also talked about the activities going on in CHAOSS’ data science working group. He encouraged the attendees to drop their project ideas and advised them on how to contribute and join CHAOSS.
Getting Started With Open Source(Talk & Workshop)
Speaker: Ifihanagbara Olusheye
Ifihan started her talk by defining open source and gave reasons why open source should be contributed to. She also spoke about “understanding the open source community” and different roles in an open source community. Also, steps and tips for finding the right project to contribute to.
Then she moved on to talk about Git(with some basic Git commands) and GitHub and then did a live demo where she showed attendees the GitHub User Interface and then steps on how to find a project, and issues, work on issues, and create a pull request. The session was very interactive as attendees were very interested and asked questions.
CHAOSSAfrica is 2 years old!
We ended the event by celebrating CHAOSSAfrica turning 2 in a few days and we cut a cake in celebration of the impact we have had in the past two years.
Every attendee participated in the question and answer sessions. The sign language interpreted the deaf and mute users’ questions and answers. At the end of the program, a participant who has a cognitive and speech impediment says that the program will be a major step for him in his software development career.
Our goals for the future
As a community, we aim to form collaborations with more communities that cater to people with disabilities and the PWD themselves who are interested in tech and introduce more people to open source and the Chaoss project. We will involve these communities in research projects, accessibility audits, open-source events, and building CHAOSS projects.
We look forward to improving the media accessibility of our event such as clear recording and proper streaming of event sessions, providing accurate closed captions and translation for attendees that need it. This can be used as a reference.
Many groups contributed to the success of the outreach program and one of those groups is the CHAOSS Africa research team. A survey was carried out during this event to get feedback on the turnout of the event and our goal is to improve the future outreach programs and subsequent events fostering more inclusion in CHAOSS.
Using the feedback gathered from the research, our next step as a community is to invite people with disabilities to join the CHAOSS community and contribute to open-source projects here. The team also wants to reach out to more people with disabilities across Africa, partner with their communities, and create an awareness of inclusivity in open-source communities and projects.
We plan to onboard these individuals utilizing the educational materials provided for Accessibility and Inclusion in open-source. We need to include people with disabilities in the groups building projects for the public.