Oversight Board/2020-2022-candidates/Peace Ojemeh

About Me

Hello, my name is Peace Ojemeh, alias Perrie; a volunteer design contributor at SugarLabs. I have been actively involved the Google OSS programs with Sugar Labs.

I have been consulting with the African Union, the International Telecommunication Union, and UN Women to bring more women into technology. Also, building a diverse community and leading the design team at Open Source Community Africa, a movement that promotes and educates everything open source within Africa. Working with the engagement team at GNOME on scalable onboarding for the community, I've tried to make OSS great for newbies.

I believe so much in the essence of community & collaboration. Hence, I have chosen to remain actively involved in strengthening communities around me, particularly in my areas of interests. I hold & reckon pertinently in the theory that, for every building, bricks & mortar are vital to the actualisation of the structure, which entails collaboration & contribution.

In the past years, I have helped to build, maintain and grow some amazing communities, within and beyond Africa.

Emerging on the board, I will initiate & establish, a positive impact on the future of SugarLabs, as well as help to significantly improve the state of affairs of the organization, internally & externally.

Vision

Being involved in the community since 2017, I have noticed that while Sugar Labs as a community has been thriving, it has also suffered a drastic & tremendous reduction in participation from a lot of contributors. We witness students drawn in from the Google Code-In (GCI) - no longer in existence - and Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programs, initially express great zeal, but lasts only for a while. To that effect, a great deal of intentional & imperative efforts have to be employed & invested in the organizational structure, to ensure that contributors stay engaged and their enthusiasm to contribute is maintained and adequately sustained.

Asides internal restructuring, I don’t see Sugar Labs highly present & represented in the conversation out there, as much as it ought to. We have to be able to tell the world, how much awesomeness this organization holds.

The need also exists, to make the organization more embracive to none-code contributions & duly begin to welcome people who can offer & add to the value chain of Sugar Labs. This would include but not limited to design, marketing etc.

Goals

If elected, I commit to:

- Work closely with the marketing and design teams to ensure that we have a well-standing external representation, extensively yet systematically driving what we do in Sugar Labs, outside. Better representation will undoubtedly mean more contributors, who will join to create the magic with us.

- Display readiness to work with anyone willing to improve the internal organizational structure, owing to the fact that an ecosystem that is ‘open’ & accommodating, would eventually breed more contributions.

- Ensuring that we revisit and implement our previous goals that still hold relevance to the organization today.

Meetings

I pledge my availability for all meetings, given my votes were required, and do whatever it takes to keep the organization, SugarLabs, moving smoothly.