Groundbreaker Talents Join ODE Community Days in Kampala

Our Talents recently joined the ODE Community Days in Kampala, a hands-on event focused on open-source development, collaborative technology and open data.

Hosted by the Open Data Ensemble (ODE) community, the event gave participants the chance to move beyond theory and experience how open-source projects are actually built: collaboratively, transparently and with contributions from people at different skill levels.

Learning how open-source collaboration works

During the event, our Talents explored the fundamentals of contributing to open-source projects.

They learned how developers work together using tools and workflows such as Git, branches and pull requests, and how contributions can go far beyond writing code. Testing, documentation, reporting bugs and improving existing features are all important parts of maintaining an open-source project.

This helped make open source feel more accessible. You do not need to know everything before contributing, in many cases, contributing is part of how you learn.

From learning to contributing

The Community Days were designed to be practical. Rather than simply attending presentations, participants worked together on real projects and applied what they were learning.

One group, for example, worked on a psychology application, giving our Talents direct experience of collaborating on a shared technical project.

They also learned more about the Open Data Ensemble ecosystem and how technology can support the collection, management and sharing of data.

For our Talents, this meant seeing how concepts from software development translate into real-world collaboration: working with existing code, understanding team workflows and contributing to a larger project.

Connecting with Uganda’s open-source community

The event also created an opportunity for our Talents to connect with developers, facilitators and contributors from Uganda’s wider tech ecosystem.

Exposure to communities like ODE matters because technical careers are not built through classroom learning alone. Understanding how developers collaborate, contribute to open-source projects and participate in professional communities gives our Talents another way to build experience, portfolios and industry connections.

A big thank you to the ODE – Open Data Ensemble community, the facilitators, partners and everyone who made the Community Days possible and welcomed our Talents into the project.

Want to be part of what comes next?

Learn more about how you can partner, mentor, or support Groundbreaker Talents‘ software engineering training in Uganda and help create sustainable tech careers for young African women.

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