My Open Source Africa Festival 2022 Attendance as a Speaker Experience part one (#OSCAFest22 Speaker Experience)
Hi everyone, I had the opportunity to attend Open Source African Conference 2022, as a speaker. I gave a presentation on “Primer on Blockchains and RSK”, where I defined about 20 popular blockchain terms, and also introduced RSK and the RIF Platforms. See slideshare for my presentation slides. My talk was attended by 100+ people in the audience.
Open Source Festival is an annual high profile three day event that attracts student delegates, developers, designers, developer advocates and corporate organisations on a large scale, featuring a series of talks, workshops, and awareness around open-sourced developer tools. I would estimate that about 800 of the audience attended this year’s event tagged #OSCAFest22 (Waiting for official number of attendees from organisers).
See event page https://festival.oscafrica.org/
I was really excited when my call for speaker submission was accepted to be featured at the event. It presented me with an opportunity to attend a high profile event after a long time, not just as an attendee but as a speaker. This gave me an opportunity to share my knowledge to an interested audience, which is something I enjoy doing, and have been doing for many years now. The sudden emergence of the #Covid19 virus prevented meetup/conference lovers like myself from attending physical meetup for many months, and #OSCAFest was one of the first events that I have been privileged to attend since the outbreak of #Covid19.
After my presentation was accepted, my amazing organisation, IOV Labs (https://iovlabs.org/), supported my trip to the conference. I immediately swung into active preparation mode, I recreated my presentation slides and then practised while recording and rerecording my presentation. My team lead, who is the Head of Developer Experience at IOV Labs, was very instrumental in my preparatory process. He worked with me to develop my slides, and gave constructive feedback on my recorded presentation.
My journey for the event started on 23rd of March, 2022 as I left my residence in Abuja, Nigeria for Lagos, where the event is being held. I arrived in Lagos that morning, and then checked into the beautiful Protea Hotel by Marriott in Ikeja, which is in the heart of Ikeja, Lagos. Thanks IOV Labs for choosing such a great place to stay while attending the Conference.
On the first day of the event, I was a bit nervous as I was scheduled to be the first speaker to give a presentation at the conference. This did not give me the opportunity to build my confidence from listening to other speakers. I did the presentation anyway, and judging from the following feedback on my presentation from Twitter, I was happy that I gave an amazing presentation.
Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/Ginowinne/status/1508566836207575041?s=20&t=gGYzkFbUewAMoIDr3C1dBA.
Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/Ginowinne/status/1507983497062924288?s=20&t=gGYzkFbUewAMoIDr3C1dBA.
Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/Ginowinne/status/1507119310002659340?s=20&t=gGYzkFbUewAMoIDr3C1dBA
Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/hinsikak/status/1506922660009287682?s=20&t=gGYzkFbUewAMoIDr3C1dBA
Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/Ginowinne/status/1506978422660247553?s=20&t=gGYzkFbUewAMoIDr3C1dBA
Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/Ginowinne/status/1506971246709424130?s=20&t=gGYzkFbUewAMoIDr3C1dBA
Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/SenseiFavour/status/1506943482056822787?s=20&t=gGYzkFbUewAMoIDr3C1dBA
Jollof, as mentioned in the above tweet is a rice dish from West Africa, and tech people in Nigeria are very fond of eating jollof rice at tech events. There is that exciting feeling when you know that there will be jollof rice at a tech event. 😁 .
Day one of the event was kicked off with my amazing presentation on a Primer on Blockchains and RSK, followed by other amazing speakers who gave presentations on different topics in tech ranging from web 2.0 topics to web 3.0.
My presentation lasted for about one hour. I started by defining 20+ popular blockchain terms. These terms are technical and can be intimidating; the intent was to build a broad tent and include newcomers That segued perfectly into an introduction to RSK + RIF, the most secure smart contract platform in the world, and the RIF Apps and Services. Towards the end of the presentation, I shared IOV Labs Job opportunities; and encouraged attendees to apply and join IOV’s global distributed team.
After my presentation on Day one of the event, the other two days were about attending amazing speaker sessions, and engaging in active networking sessions with developers, designers, and developer advocates. Due to how my presentation was received, it was easy to network with those who wanted to talk with me about blockchain, and IOV Labs recruitment opportunities.
Here are some points from some sessions that I attended.
Topic: An Introductory Guide to Decentralised Finance (DeFi) by Mayowa Tudonu
URL to the event schedule page for this talk.
https://oscafest22.sched.com/event/ywnH/an-introductory-guide-to-decentralised-finance-defi
He talked about the basic concepts in DeFi, like protocol, Liquidity, Liquidity Provider, Liquidity Pool, Liquidity pool Tokens, Tokens, Market Maker, Liquidity Provider.
DeFi Applications vs TradFi Applications
Examples of DeFi Protocols — MakerDAO, Compound, Uniswap, Augur
Documentation as a Service: How we’re changing the game at Xata by
Topic: Documentation is key to good Developer Experience
Normal Docs are often — Slow, outdated, and Impact-opaque
Xata’s Docs are — Fast — SSG + Edge CDN, Up-to-date (They are generated from code), and impactful (Impactful — Based on User Feedback).
Topic: Organic Community Building and fostering Trust for Web3 by Joshua Gabriel Oluwaseyi
URL to the event schedule page for this talk
https://oscafest22.sched.com/event/ywUB/organic-community-building-and-fostering-trust-for-web3
Web3 common misconceptions and their merits.
Key points:
- Is Web3 wealth creation or elaborate Ponzi schemes filled with tech buzzwords?
- More and more people are falling prey to rug-pulled DeFi projects.
- All details of web3 projects are often publicly available on the blockchain and any attempt at hiding or complicating simple info on projects are heavily frowned upon.
- What makes a web3 project stick?
- Organic community building implies understanding that at least 70% of the time the odds are against you.
- A big and harmful web3 startup trend is the centralisation of web3 access in a supposed to be decentralised ecosystem
Community at the core of Web3
As a Web3 startup founder or leader, your focus should be centered on organic community building and product development, making better smart contracts, making your dApp (Decentralised App) designs extremely user friendly amongst other things.
How to build trust in your Web3 Community.
As a web3 builder, how can you build trust in Web3 communities with genuine organic stakeholders to scale?
● Value proposition
● Transparency
● Documentation/Education
● Web3 Community
● Engagement
● Simplicity/Ease of Access
Conclusion.
There’s a huge and relatively untapped opportunity in web3 surrounding its real-world use cases and problems it stands to solve especially in privacy, cyber security, wealth creation & distribution and finance.
Improving Developer Experience With Documentation by Rufai Mustapha
URL to event schedule for this session.
https://oscafest22.sched.com/event/ywTa/improving-developer-experience-with-documentation
He touched on the following points:
Who are developers?
- Key point
- They are people interested in learning how to integrate your product or services into their projects, and services
Why do they want your service?
- Key point
- Because it’s easy to implement; and provides added value to their project
Are they able to use your service?
- Key Point
- Is your documentation easy to understand and implement
How do you keep developers happy while using your service?
- Key Point
- Provide great support services, and try to simplify and incentivize them
Scale Factory (Mean Time To Hello World)
Mean Time To Hello World is the average amount of time it takes a developer to achieve a minimal tangible result with a new piece of technology.
Topic: Building thriving NFT communities by Precious Ezema
URL to the event schedule page for this talk
https://oscafest22.sched.com/speaker/gabbyprecious21
Precious is a thought leader, digital content creator, digital skills trainer and a community manager. She started her career in tech in 2015 and has worked with a couple of tech brands which includes Enyata community, GOMYCODE, RAD5 Tech Hub and Google digital skills for Africa.
She talked about the following points
What are NFTs
- NFTs, which literally means Non — fungible tokens, are digital ownership certificates with property rights enforced by blockchain technology.
- “Non-fungible” means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else.
The emergence of NFTs
- The first NFT project that was ever created was in 2015 and it was named Etheria. It was launched 3 months after the Ethereum blockchain was launched.
- In 2017 online game CryptoKitties was monetized by selling tradable cat NFTs, and its success brought some public attention to NFTs.
Defining community
- A community can be defined as a group of people forming a smaller social unit sharing common interests, work, identity, location, etc.
- The word “community” has a strange power to it. It conveys a sense of togetherness and positivity.
Communities X NFT projects
Before an NFT drops, the community refers to those engaging with the project on social media and those looking to mint.
Practical ways to build engaging communities
- Define your target audience.
- Art is great, NFTs are amazing but you have to understand that not everyone would love your art and your story and it’s fine.
- From the initial stage, start by defining your target audience, it helps you connect with the right tribe
Offer value
- There are several NFT projects and communities springing up by the second.
- Offering value is the only way to stay afloat. Think of creative ways to add add value to your community members
Show a clear road map
- For people to fully believe in a vision and a project, they have to picture it. Show the long term goals for the project.
- Drop teasers,show a road map for future plans, give community members something to brag about.
Treat members as Stakeholders
- Treat members as stakeholdersYou have to understand that once you decide to build a community around your NFT, you become answerable to the people.
- Involve your community members in the decision making process, seek suggestions and opinions from them
Learn to delegate responsibilities
- Involving people in tasks gives them a sense of belonging.
- Delegate tasks, just like any other organisations, NFT projects have roles.
- Assign these roles to team members and offer a reward.
Don’t Force People to Grind
- Stop with the pyramid invite scheme.
- Stop with the excessive giveaways and freebies.
- Allow people join the community because they really love the project not
- because they are being offered a freebie or Whitelist position
Some NFT communities nailing it
- Women-tribe NFTS
- Bored Ape Yacht Club
- Cryptopunks
- Afrobubble NFTs
I attended several other sessions too, just keeping this article brief!. See part two of this article, a continuation of part one.
Click here to find part two of this article, a continuation of my experience at the event.