Regina Nkemchor Adejo
Regina has over nine years of experience working with database projects in the IT industry. Currently, she is a Software Engineer at IKEA. Regina is passionate about open-source software. She is the founder of the Pranet initiative; A non-profit organization championing projects that bring about early technology skills in children living in rural communities in Africa. Regina is the Vice President of the board of directors at GNOME Foundation, a non-profit organization building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. She is building the GNOME Africa community and Linux App Summit (LAS) conference - A global Linux community. She is a speaker who enjoys engaging her audiences during her presentations.
Session
Nowadays, sustainability is often discussed around open-source (OS) projects. Research has shown that OS projects have been sustaining their project over the years through forking, which has continued to serve as an invisible hand of support to several OS projects. Forking has helped OS projects get through extreme events such as commercial acquisitions, lawsuits, and funding. However, the role of mentorship to open-source project sustainability has been downplayed for a while now. Through mentoring, newcomers to OSS projects acquire essential technical, social, and organizational skills relevant to a project's life span. According to research, mentoring newcomers can help recruit and retain skilled and outstanding contributors to open-source projects. But then, how do we identify prospective mentors in an Open-source project? How do we understand mentors' challenges? And how do we build strategies to support mentors' work within an OS project? This talk will introduce how OS projects and communities can leverage mentorship to sustain, retain and recruit diverse contributors.