UbuCon Africa and DjangoCon Africa 2025

This year, UbuCon Africa takes place in Arusha, Tanzania. It’s co-located with DjangoCon Africa 2025 (11th-15th August) at Life Fitness Hall, Njiro.

The whole event is five days of open source engagement and collaboration.

There’ll be three days of talks, on programming, technology, careers, society and business, followed by two more of hands-on training and learning sessions, led by experts in the field.

Our speakers and attendees come from all over the world and include well-known figures in open-source software.

Canonical at the event

Canonical will be represented in strength! Two of our Directors of Engineering will be there: Sebastian Trzcinski-Clément, Canonical’s global head of Community, and Daniele Procida, who leads Documentation at Canonical.

There will be colleagues from other teams: Ubuntu, OpenStack, Ceph, LaunchPad and Multipass, all also presenting talks and running workshops, including sessions on how to find work in the international software industry, and how to become an open source contributor.

Amongst the initiatives they are presenting is Canonical’s Open Documentation Academy – one of the ways people can become involved in open-source software through working on documentation.

DjangoCon Africa

The first DjangoCon Africa took place in 2023, in Zanzibar. It brought together 200 attendees from more than 22 countries. 

This year’s event will be another step forward for Africa’s open-source software communities, a show-case for African talent and expertise, that brings members of the global community to meet African professionals, students and entrepreneurs.

The first-ever UbuCon Africa

This is the very first UbuCon Africa – we hope it will be the first of a long series of UbuCon Africa events! 

An UbuCon is an Ubuntu Conference – a volunteer-run, regional event that enables the global community of Ubuntu teams, users, and organisations to come together to work on current challenges, share knowledge, and network within the Ubuntu project.

Co-locating the first UbuCon Africa with the passionate Django community is going to be an exciting experience, where we can engage in sessions and workshops, and network with like-minded individuals. We also want to hear feedback from the African open source community and inspire you to join or even launch your own Local Community wherever you are.

After all, Ubuntu is an African word (“humanity to others” or “I am because we are”). Whether you’re a seasoned contributor, a die-hard Debian-based developer or just curious about Ubuntu, this is your moment to connect, contribute, and celebrate the power of people-powered tech.

Canonical is hiring

Canonical hires people from all over the world to work remotely on open-source software. More than 40 Canonical employees are African – we’d like to increase that number.

We’re a fully-distributed company, and our attendance at events like UbuCon/DjangoCon Africa demonstrates our commitment to the idea that software talent is to be found all over the world. In fact three of the Canonical attendees at the event are themselves from Africa and can share their stories of finding success in the global workplace.

We hope to return from Arusha having found some new colleagues. Have a look at our many open roles, make some notes, and when you meet us at the event, ask us some questions – we want to help the right candidates get a job at Canonical by setting them on the right track from the start.