I have been a member for a while, but I sort of missed this topic until just now, so I figure better late than never yeah?
My name is Osioke Itseuwa, I work remotely from Lagos, Nigeria. I am the community lead at Pavilion. Pavilion is a distributed global cooperative of freelancers specialising in building online communities on the open source tools that power them. We are showing how communities can be used to foster a new economic model for the gig economy that empowers workers directly.
Before joining Pavilion, I was the primary Community Advocate at Discourse, building out our community initiatives and serving as the primary Community expert to our Enterprise clients.
My first experience with communities was back in 2009 during University where I found that when fellow course mates came together in groups to discuss a topic, each individual became a sum of everyone’s knowledge on the topic in the group. This led me to start a now defunct community association called OpenIT to bring together all the skilled IT students so everyone could learn from each other and help the businesses on campus grow digitally.
Since then, I have worked in different roles and organisations and after realising that I always approached my work from an open source community-centred perspective, I pivoted to working as a community professional and an open sourcerer. This has led me to work with, contribute, manage and own the development of communities and products with companies like GitHub (as part of their devrel efforts in Sub Saharan Africa), Google SSA, Discourse.org.
My current career focus these days is looking to understand and contribute to the evolution of communities and open source as they enable new forms of business and work. I’ve shared some of my work on this here previously.
In summary, I am a lean community, product, growth and open source professional with excellent strategy and retail experience spanning 10 years.