The Open Source Journey through the Google Summer of Code, An African Perspective

The University of Buea over the past two years has sextupled it's Google Summer of Code(GSoC) participants from 2 in 2013 to 12 in 2015 due to the hard work of the Google Developer Group Buea. The Open source culture is new in Africa and University students in Cameroon are taking the lead in Open source development through GSoC, with the Art of community imbibed in students on campus.

The Open Source culture has grown enormously within the student developer community in Cameroon over the past two years; due to the unrelenting efforts of the Google Student Ambassador and the Google Developer Group Buea. In 2013 two students were selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC); being the first from Francophone Africa to participate in this program made a great impact in our hearts. Africa has less than 5 percent of the participants in the Google Summer of Code. The 2013 GSoCers decided to spur an open source culture on the University Campus; organizing install fests to encourage more students adopt the Linux OS. Having attended the Google Doc Camp in October 2013, working with BRL-CAD, OpenMRS and GNOME, we mentored students in 2014 to participate in GSoC and the Google Code In (GCI). We were lucky to have the first female GSoCers in Africa from Cameroon and with our continued effort imbibing the spirit of community among the students in 2014 increasing our participants by 50 percent. In 2015, due the the continued awareness created in the two previous years, the University of Buea emerged among the Top Universities in the world with 10 selected students; the first African University to appear on this list(http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/05/gsoc-2015-stats-part-2-universities_6.html) and 12 students overall from Cameroon (http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/05/gsoc-2015-stats-part-1-all-about.html). This became a reality with the assistance of the University administration, the organization of programming meetups and hackathons on campus to help more students hone their computer programming skills. This has spurred a lot of interest Computer programming within the University communities across the country; with high school aspiring to study Computer Science. We hope our journey will continue to inspire the love for Open Source technologies and spur more open source developers across the Country and Africa as a whole.