It’s been over a week since I attended OSCAFest 2025 and CHAOSScon Africa 2025, the experience from both gatherings have left lasting impressions and memorable moments on me. All located in Lagos, Nigeria, it was a week-long activity attending CHAOSScon Africa 2025 on the 13th and OSCAFest 2025 on the 15th – 16th of August. 

CHAOSS, which is dedicated to creating metrics and analytics to measure the health and sustainability of open-source projects, this time served as an insightful and educational conference. Its sessions dove deep into topics of inclusion, building open-source communities and the discerning business value of open source.

Being involved in The Fedora Project helped me recognize the significant creative value that upstream open source projects contribute to commercial software. Brian Proffitt (Red Hat) talk on the “Metrics and the Business of Open Source” revealed  “The Value and Freedom of Creativity” in the Red Hat’’s approach to open source.

On August 15th, I joined the OSCAFest train, experiencing the biggest open-source festival in Africa. The event attracted a diverse range of attendees, including developers, designers, and enthusiasts, with a little under a thousand people in attendance. There were so many talk sessions spread across five different rooms that I occasionally had to move from room to room to attend the ones I was interested in. At OSCAFest, the focus was on enabling growth through open source and inspiring attendees with mentorship-driven talks.

Overall, I had a great time at both events as a Fedora ambassador. I made new friends, connected with people about the Fedora community, and onboarded some potential new contributors to The Fedora Project. Being part of both events as an ambassador creates a pathway for greater visibility of The Fedora Project and our incredible community. It’s a strong start to establishing a larger regional community of contributors and enthusiasts from Africa.

I shared some additional event highlights on my Twitter/X handle (see tweet 1 and tweet 2). One key takeaway was a noticeable difficulty in the onboarding process, while I aimed to recruit new Fedora contributors, I found that Element Chat, our primary community platform, was unfamiliar to many attendees. I frequently received questions about whether we used platforms like Discord or Slack, which often halted conversations. This was a clear indication that for future event outreach, adopting a more popular, regionally familiar platform could serve as a better first line of onboarding, attracting and retaining an audience until they are ready to progressively move to our stable platforms.

I look forward to attending these events again, with the hope of speaking to the audience and further promoting our great community.