Hello World!

My name is Samson Goddy and I will running for the OSI's Board of Directors seat because I believe in the movement of free and open source software. 

About Me 

I am an 18-year-old Open Sourcerer and a junior developer in the Sugar Labs community. I currently sit on Sugar Labs's Oversight Board and I preach the gospel of importance of open source within Africa. I came into the world of freedom, thanks to the One Laptop Per Child Initiative in Nigeria. My first PC as a 10 year-old kid in Port Harcourt was running Linux (Sugar on top Fedora). I saw myself transiting from becoming "just" a user of linux to becoming a developer and an enthusiast. I promote free and open source software around my STEAM activities, a BAM4Scratch (Building African Momentum for Scratch) ambassador, which I help the Scratch team at MIT Media Lab to promote Scratch within Africa. I also help promote Google OSS project in Africa, I always help reach out and help student developers through Google Code-IN and Google Summer of Code as a mentor.

Why should you vote for me?

I already have experience in board membership, I may be young and less experienced compare to other candidates or past boards. But promoting open source initiative is something I can do really well and in an excellent way. This community need a young member to be on the board, so young enthusiasts can see the importances of open source. OSI needs young mind.

Promises

     I usually don't use the term "I promise to", because I prefer actions over words. Just a few weeks before deciding to run for OSI Board of Directors, I co-founded a movement called "Open Source Community Africa" (Facebook) the aim is to continue and create a goal to help integrate the act of open source contribution to Africans whilst strongly advocating for open source development. So with this project;

• Increase OSI's Membership: I will continue doing my open source outreaching to grow the interest of the people by speaking on conferences and  making online presence which by doing some share the importance of becoming a OSI member.
• Mentorship: I will continue making more efforts in area of mentorships so I can help create the next #NextBillionCreators and continue with all existing mentorship programs.
• Gender divide: I plan to start working to make sure more females can get interest in open source by working and promoting FOSS programs within community like women tech makers.
• Open Source Africa: Africa is the continent with most number of youths and with country like Nigeria is the 8 highest user of internet and with the fast interest of technology in the continent, I plan to convert youths into the world of FOSS using the help of existing open source community and the community I am launching. I will also focus in converting non-technical contributors.
• More PRs: As part of my journey, I usually give people reasons on why making first open source contribution is important and I sometimes share my story to serve a encourage. I will introduce open source communities to technical writers, translators, educators and developers to come and help build a better world of freedom.