Building a Tech Community from Scratch: A Community Lead's Perspective

I have had the pleasure of leading the OpenInfra User Group Kenya for nine months. And honestly, I’ve enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

Building a tech community has been my dream for a while, and I’m so glad that this community has helped me achieve it.

In this blog, I discuss the practical aspects of creating a community from the ground up and organizing an in-person event attended by over 100 people.

I’ll take you through the journey as a story and then share the lessons I have learned.

I first heard about OpenStack in early 2024. I was applying for Outreachy, and when I saw a cloud project, I thought, why not? I had coding skills and some AWS knowledge. Surely I could transfer it.

I talk about the journey in the aforelinked blog.

Fast forward, I finished my Outreachy journey, but my love for OpenStack had just begun.

I remember speaking with Tatiana Ovchinnikova, who was my mentor and is the current OpenStack Horizon Project Team Lead, about whether I could start an OpenStack Community in Africa.

She was, of course, very supportive of the idea.

In my hunt around the internet for Africans who knew OpenStack, I met Sharon Koech, Alvin Ndung’u, and Wada Akor Kenneth Jeremiah.

Sharon had contributed to OpenStack Neutron, Alvin had started an OpenInfra community in Kenya, and Kenneth was leading OpenStack Nigeria.

I was thrilled, and several conversations later, Sharon and I took over the reins.

We were later joined by Andrew Njagi, who is a community co-leader at the African Ruby Community, and Patrick Odhiambo, who co-leads the CloudForceSky Community.

When you start, you’re the only one who cares about your dream and goal.

Over time, you talk to others, and you sell them your idea. It’s a bit like how the startup world works.

At the beginning of 2025, we had only 55 members on Meetup and no other presence anywhere else.

We began a LinkedIn page and had our first-ever speaker, Paul Mayero, talk to us about DevStack, which is what you use to install vanilla OpenStack.

We also held a second event, a Twitter/X space with the Nairobi DevOps community, Push, Pull, Merge: What really is Open Source?

Strategy is important, and we knew from the outset that we couldn’t do this alone.

After all, collaboration is the engine that powers open source. Our second virtual event was a collaboration between our community and the Nairobi DevOps community.

It did help that Alvin is also involved in the Nairobi DevOps community.

OpenStack turned 15 in July. We wanted to host an OpenStack birthday and insisted that it should be in person.

We met with Helena Spease, Community Programs Manager at the OpenInfra Foundation, and shared our goal to host an OpenStack birthday.

We were growing steadily at this point, and at around 100 members on Meetup, we had reached the threshold of hosting an OpenInfra Day.

An OpenInfra Day is a regional event, usually one or two days, organized by an OpenInfra community.

And the dream got bigger.

We initially wanted to host the event in June, but with only 5 weeks to go, we didn’t have any of the core resources required to hold an OpenInfra Day: funding, a venue, sponsors, and speakers.

Because I’m a ‘get it done’ kind of girl, I had to do something. I would tell the world about the community and event.

I went to the Nairobi Startup Summit 3.0 and talked to every tech company with a booth about our community and the upcoming event. I didn’t think I was good at sales, but then, it turns out, all you need is something you believe in enough.

I came back with a few strategic contacts. And the follow-ups began. I even took Sam McKenna’s sales emailing course on YouTube.

I was starting to freak out a little. In tech, people love to say “build in public,” but nothing prepares you for how risky it is. This statement implies “failing in public,” which I wasn’t prepared to do.

There was no way the event was happening in June.

After several properly crafted sales pitch emails and meetings with potential sponsors and partners, we got our very first yes!

The OpenInfra Foundation has a community support kitty! It was such a relief. This was going to happen after all!

Our second yes was from Angani Limited, who graciously granted us access to their office space for the day at no cost.

I went to visit their office, and it is such a colourful space! The best part? Their logo and branding are the same colours OpenInfra uses.

The Angani CTO, Denson Ngumo, and Shehnain Aboo, Head of Sales and Marketing, were welcoming hosts, and you could tell that they love supporting tech communities in Kenya.

Canonical Ltd also came on board, and yes, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but it felt more like the entire Milky Way galaxy.

With this renewed hope, it was only judicious to postpone the event to September.

The planning was now more concrete. Now that we had overcome the sponsors’ obstacle, we could concentrate on the numerous other components of this intricate puzzle.

Honestly, in hindsight, there was so much going on that it’s a little overwhelming to put it all in a clear timeline.

I started with the supply side of things. Speakers.

We did a Call for Proposals (CFP) and gave it about a month. Strategy dictated talking to other people who we knew could help and would like to share their knowledge.

At the end of the CFP, we had a diverse group of speakers sourced from friends, other tech communities, community co-organizers, sponsors, and absolutely new faces who submitted their CFPs.

Being the first event, we weren’t being choosy, as long as the topic was related to open source.

The CFP process was going on, with a lot of contribution from Linet Shammah, Data Scientist, our volunteer who figured out how to work with Sessionize for speaker management.

I’m yet to get to the lessons I learned, but new tech was one of our challenges when organizing this event.

We also had to meet the speakers to support them and answer their questions.

The volunteers, Linet and Marvin Muriithi, who contribute to the Linux Kernel, ensured that we got the speaker decks on time and that they were on brand.

We had to choose vendors too. Food is important. You cannot engage with a hungry audience. So the vendor list included food, photography, branding, cake, and custom design work.

The vendor process was quite something. It did help that team members got specific vendors to follow up with.

The demand side, on the other hand, had to keep going. It meant consistent LinkedIn posts. I could only manage once a week at the beginning and then once a day during the week towards the event.

We didn’t have a dedicated designer, so I became one by default. It wasn’t too bad, as we had some customizable templates from OpenInfra.

Having to post every day makes you consistent, and there’s nothing worth doing that doesn’t require consistency.

On the demand side, we also had to get people interested in attending the event. Otherwise, what community would we be building?

In comes another essential piece of the puzzle. Communities. We had been talking to a few of them, and we got lots of help from Nairobi DevOps, Cloudforce Sky, and Cloud Native Nairobi.

Community collaboration helped us a lot in getting techies to know about our event.

We needed an MC for the day too. Kevin Tuei, Cloud Tech Consultant, Community Builder, and Tech MC, was suggested, as he’s been a great MC in other tech events too. He is also a Nairobi DevOps Community co-lead and the community lead at the AWS AI/ML group.

The planning phase might not sound as exciting, right? It’s the part of the movie that you might want to skip.

We were still a little worried. Would people actually show up? We initially wanted to work with 150 RSVPs. But we had about 60 people on the waitlist.

We decided to take a risk and open it up. We also sent an attendee confirmation form to have an idea about who would actually be coming for the event.

There were no guarantees here. We didn’t receive any proper estimates from the form. But we were going to soldier on, despite.

With all these pieces beautifully coming together, it was time to do what Kevin, our MC, called “venue recon.”

Friday afternoon. Sharon, Linet, and I showed up to have a feel of how the day was going to be.

The excitement was palpable.

When the t-shirts, name tags, and the rest of the branding arrived, it felt like Christmas.

Check out my other blog about the OpenInfra Day event in detail.

As you may have noticed from my experience, leading a community can be challenging. However, it can be fulfilling, too. In this section, I share some of the lessons I have learned in hindsight.

It is a community for a reason. Ask for help, and get as much support as you can. You cannot do everything alone, as there are many aspects, just like in an organization.

This is a bit hard to do if you are a young community that’s getting started, but as soon as you can, have different people do different things. Define everybody’s roles clearly so that everyone knows what’s expected of them.

We are techies, and it can be paradoxical to talk about tech being challenging. We needed to use Sessionize for speaker management, which was a bit of a learning curve.

We also used Riverside.fm for recording, as we wanted to keep the virtual speakers’ presentations and publish them on YouTube.

We did test the platform, but it had a 2-hour limit we didn’t know about, but we recovered well.

Building a community means that you are dealing with many people and having lots of conversations.

You, therefore, need to carry the vision, listen to your team, and ensure that you achieve the intended goal.

You also have partners, stakeholders, vendors, and numerous people who need you to make decisions, so you need to keep your head.

We had quite a packed schedule. Speakers wanted to share their knowledge, and the audience was eager to learn.

To move at a better pace, we need two days, which would allow for more networking and conversations.

It would also allow enough time for demo sessions.

We had speakers come back to present virtually since everybody was a bit worn out towards the end.

The vendor side of things can be tricky. You need to agree as a team on how to choose vendors and do it on time to avoid last-minute rushes.

Having specific team members take point on various vendors was a good move, as it was easy to do follow-ups.

It helps to have a clearer CFP process so that speakers have a submission deadline and then a reviewing and acceptance deadline.

Having a point person in the team for this also helps. Engage with the speakers and understand their challenges and how to support them.

People are diverse, and while we did our best, we knew it was difficult to create a splendid experience for everyone.

It’s beneficial to create some little room for disappointment. We had a few tech hitches too, but we recovered well.

We also started a bit late, which made the event end later than we expected.

We had a few changes to the schedule. In hindsight, it would have been better to consult speakers, as some would have preferred earlier slots.

That said, we still did our best to be accommodating, even inviting back some of the speakers virtually.

I’ve always seen myself as a leader. I have led teams in different capacities, formally and informally.

One of the things that has been pivotal in my leadership journey is an experience I had a while back.

I was in my final year of university. I was part of a leadership program known as “The Ascent.” It’s quite an intense 12-week program. My role was to facilitate a team of eight people for the duration of the program.

One of our very first activities was similar to an “Amazing Race,” which means that you have to finish sets of physical challenges within a specific time.

The winning team is the one that completes the challenges in the shortest time. So, it’s also a game of strategy and teamwork.

My team began well. But we got stuck at one activity, “beach ball bump.” This can be a frustrating game, as you need to coordinate taping a super light beach ball over a distance of about 50 m without dropping it or one person bumping it twice consecutively.

The ball is light, so it’s easy for wind to keep blowing it away. Team members are also of different heights. You have to tap the ball lightly enough to keep it moving. Tap it too hard and it flies off.

After 15 harrowing minutes, the team was ready to give up. One person on the team sat down complaining and took the team’s energy with them. The rest of the team followed and sat.

As the team leader, this was going to be our make-it-or-break-it moment. I took the ball, held it in my arms, and promised to address the disgruntled team members’ concerns later.

I then took the ball, and with the team now on their feet, I performed the first tap, followed by a clean, coordinated tap across the required distance.

The team’s energy came back, and this momentum carried us all through to the end of the challenges.

Did we win? No. But we were the best team in two out of the three legs of the physical activity.

I did keep my word about addressing concerns. I made it a point to spend time with as many team members as possible to learn their strengths and how they can contribute to the team.

We ended up being the best team overall after the 12 weeks.

Years later, this experience remains deeply etched in my memory, a place I return to whenever I need to lead teams.

It reminds me that leadership is hard, and as the leader, I bear the vision and keep the team’s energy and momentum in the right direction.

I remain dedicated to leading and developing the community until it reaches a point where I can successfully hand it over.

For now, we are working on the next ideas, especially around restructuring and Hacktoberfest, so that I have less on my community plate and become the vision bearer.