UbuCon Kenya 2026

27 Mar 2026, 08:00 → 28 Mar 2026, 23:45 Africa/Nairobi

Charles Odada, Geoffrey Nyaga, Sharon Koech

Welcome to UbuCon Kenya 2026. This event will be the first to be organized by the Ubuntu Kenya community, in association with USIU-Africa, and Kenya Flying Labs. Our mission is to bring together members of Kenya’s rich and growing open-source ecosystem to collaborate and accelerate our journeys to our open-source goals. This conference aims to bring together open-source enthusiasts to showcase their work and inspire the next generation of open-source contributors in Kenya.

Friday 27 March

08:00 → 08:45 Attendee registration

Registration of attendees

08:45 → 09:00 Welcome and announcements

Welcoming attendees and making any necessary announcements

09:30 → 10:00 Ubuntu Cloud-Init: From Development to Production with Multipass

Modern infrastructure demands consistent, repeatable deployments across development, testing, and production environments. This talk will demonstrate how Ubuntu's cloud-init and Multipass create a unified workflow from laptop to data center.

Attendees will learn how to leverage Ubuntu's native cloud-init project to automate server provisioning across multiple environments: local development with Multipass, homelab virtualization, and public cloud deployments. Through practical examples and live demonstrations, they'll discover how the same cloud-init configuration files work seamlessly across all deployment targets.

I'll explore real-world automation workflows, version management strategies across Ubuntu LTS and latest releases, and demonstrate how small teams can achieve enterprise-grade infrastructure consistency using Ubuntu's ecosystem tools.

Speaker: Duncan Njoroge (Infrastructure Engineer, Ericsson.)

10:00 → 10:30 Building Verifiable Knowledge Systems with Agentic RAG and Knowledge Graphs

Large Language Models are increasingly being embedded into production systems, yet many current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches struggle with trust, traceability, and operational robustness.

This talk explores how Agentic RAG combined with Knowledge Graphs can be used to build verifiable, auditable knowledge systems rather than opaque AI applications. Using Telos, a recently released legal reasoning engine, as a concrete case study, the session examines how complex domain knowledge can be structured, retrieved, reasoned over, and iteratively refined.

Topics covered include:

• Limitations of naïve RAG architectures in real systems
• Agent-based retrieval and reasoning workflows
• Knowledge graphs as structural infrastructure for grounding and provenance
• Design patterns for inspection, traceability, and controlled generation
• Infrastructure considerations for deploying and operating such systems

Although the case study is drawn from the legal domain, the architectural principles apply broadly to compliance, finance, internal knowledge platforms, and other knowledge-intensive systems.

Speaker: Western Onzere

Knowledge Systems

10:30 → 11:00 Morning tea break

11:00 → 11:30 PostgreSQL on RISC-V Ubuntu: deb/snap/rock/charm

This session will demonstrate PostgreSQL Deb, Snap, Rock, Charm, and Juju on RISC-V using Canonical Ubuntu.

We will also showcase the UI/UX similarity across different architectures, including AMD, ARM, and RISC-V, as well as the simplicity of managing applications using the Juju application lifecycle management system.

Speaker: Mr Alex Lutay (Canonical)

11:30 → 12:00 LXD in Production: Building a Cost-Effective Private Cloud on Bare Metal for African Deployments

Managing cloud infrastructure in Africa comes with unique constraints — high AWS/Azure costs, unreliable connectivity, and the need to serve multiple markets efficiently. This talk explores how LXD can be used to build a robust, production-grade private cloud on bare metal servers, dramatically reducing infrastructure costs without sacrificing reliability or flexibility.
Drawing from real-world experience managing hybrid infrastructure across 8 African markets, this session covers: setting up and managing LXD clusters on bare metal, designing container profiles and storage pools for multi-tenant workloads, networking strategies including bridged and OVN networking, practical operational lessons — backups, monitoring, and day-2 operations.
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of when LXD makes sense over VMs or Kubernetes, and a practical blueprint for deploying it in production.

Speaker: Mucheru Maina

_LXD in Production.pptx

12:00 → 12:30 An Open Blueprint for Climate-Resilient Microrobots Swarm Using Ubuntu

Water scarcity remains one of the most urgent challenges in arid and semi-arid regions across Kenya and Africa. Instead of proposing large centralized infrastructure, this talk presents an open blueprint and technical framework for building decentralized, solar-powered microrobot swarms using Ubuntu and open-source technologies.

The session focuses on the architecture required to build such a system (not a finished product),making it realistic, research-driven, and collaborative.

The proposed framework includes:
- Ubuntu Core for embedded device management
- Open-source firmware for modular microrobot units
- MQTT-based communication for swarm coordination
- Python-based control and optimization logic
- Ubuntu Server edge nodes for local orchestration
- MicroK8s for distributed simulation and testing
- Open hardware standards for community-driven iteration

The talk demonstrates how Ubuntu can extend beyond traditional computing environments into decentralized environmental infrastructure. By framing the project as an open, extensible platform, the session invites developers, students, researchers, and makers to experiment, simulate and contribute improvements.

Attendees will gain a clear understanding of how open-source tools can be used to design scalable, resilient systems that address real-world African climate challenges.

Speaker: STACEY INGOLO (KABARAK UNIVERSITY)

12:30 → 13:00 Open source datasets: Powering inclusive communication for the deaf community

Communication is a fundamental human right, yet millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals across Kenya and Africa face significant barriers in accessing digital content and services. Signvrse is an open-source digital sign language interpreter that converts text and spoken language into expressive sign language animations rendered on avatars in real time — built on open-source foundations to demonstrate how community-driven technology can unlock inclusion at scale.
An estimated 600,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing Kenyans rely on Kenyan Sign Language as their primary mode of communication, yet the vast majority of digital platforms remain inaccessible to them. Human interpreters are scarce and expensive, and existing commercial solutions are proprietary, costly, and largely untailored to African contexts.

Our flagship product,TERP360 accepts text or speech input in any language and produces accurate, natural sign language output through animated 3D avatars. By leveraging open-source dataset models and sign language datasets, the platform supports multiple language inputs and is designed to be community-auditable and extensible. Source code, datasets, and models are released under permissive open-source licences to encourage contribution and adaptation for other African sign languages.
Signvrse has the potential to transform how deaf communities interact with public services, healthcare, education, and media in Kenya. Our vision is a Pan-African accessibility layer that any application can integrate — making the digital world truly inclusive. UbuCon Kenya 2026 is the ideal platform to share this work and rally developers to explore how they can contribute.

Speakers: Ms Winnie Ongiri (Signvrse), Mr Elly Savatia (Signvrse)

13:00 → 14:00 Lunch Break

Lunch Break

14:00 → 14:30 Building a secure home lab with Raspberry Pi and Tailscale

Speaker: Felix Jumason (Cursor AI)

14:30 → 15:00 Launchpad: Open source collaboration and Linux-focused development

Speaker: Mr Charles Odada

15:00 → 16:45 Workshop - Building Secure Dev Environments with Ubuntu on WSL for Cloud, Containers, and DevSecOps

In Kenya, the "OS divide" is a silent barrier. Many of us start our software engineering journeys on shared family laptops or second-hand corporate machines where we don't have full control over the hardware or BIOS.

A Personal Story
I remember my first serious development machine, an ASUS laptop I received from a relative. It was a former company laptop, and due to administrative locks and my own skill level at the time, I couldn't reset the BIOS or disable Secure Boot to dual-boot Ubuntu. For a long time, I felt like a "second-class" developer because I couldn't run a native Linux environment.

WSL as the Equalizer
This workshop is for everyone in that position. We will explore how Ubuntu on WSL has lowered the barrier to entry, allowing us to teach CLI fundamentals (inspired by community mentorship at KidsCodelab) and professional Linux workflows without the risk of partitioning a hard drive or fighting a locked BIOS.

Core of the workshop
We will move beyond the basics of wsl --install to show how to turn that same "restricted" Windows machine into a hardened, workstation.

Workshop Roadmap:

The Foundation: Enabling systemd and using the free personal tier of Ubuntu Pro to get enterprise-grade security and Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) on a consumer laptop.

Modern DevSecOps: A hands-on look at deploying Kubernetes locally with Kind and using Cilium with eBPF.

Observability: Using Hubble to visualize network traffic and block unauthorized pods at the kernel level.

Ensuring your local Ubuntu environment perfectly mirrors the high-performance cloud servers you'll deploy to.

Speaker: Godfrey Ogembo (Kidscodelab)

Pre-labs slides

Workshop hands on labs

15:00 → 16:45 Workshop - From Predictive to Generative AI: A Hands-On Journey Through the AI Revolution

Overview
This interactive workshop explores the paradigm shift in AI, from traditional predictive models to modern generative systems, using live coding, real datasets, and practical examples. Attendees will experience AI not as a black box, but as a tool they can build, understand, and deploy themselves.

Workshop Structure

Part 1: The Predictive World (Traditional ML)

1. Demonstration using the Titanic dataset
2. Classic pipeline: Load → Clean → Train → Predict
3. Hands-on with Logistic Regression via scikit-learn
4. Limitation: Outputs only known categories (0 or 1, survived/died)

Part 2: The Generative World (LLMs)

1. Solve the same problem using natural language prompts

2. Introduction to prompt engineering as the “new programming”

3. Compare cloud AI (Google Gemini API) vs local AI (Ollama)

4. Breakthrough: AI that explains, creates, and converses

Part 3: Interactive AI Chat System

1. Ask AI questions about the data in plain English

2. Receive insights, explanations, and analysis on-demand

3. Experience AI as an intelligent assistant, not just a calculator

Technical Stack

1. Python 3.8+ with Jupyter Notebooks

2. Scikit-learn for traditional ML

3. Google Gemini API for cloud generative AI

4. Ollama for local AI on Ubuntu/Linux

Speaker: Mr Kevin Obote (Guild Code)

15:00 → 16:45 Workshop - Running Your Own Photo Cloud (And Saving Money Doing It)

Google Drive has a storage limit of 15 GB. This capacity is almost always filled by photos since they have become easy to take because of the advances of technology. Once the 15GB capacity is exceeded, users are not able to send or receive emails on their Gmail accounts. At this point, they are forced to pay Google to access their email. This is horrendous. The essence of this workshop will be to show attendees just how easy they can self-host their own photo cloud using Ente[1] - an open source google photos alternative - on Oracle Cloud and save money while doing it.

Links
1. Ente - https://ente.io/

Speaker: Paul Mayero

16:45 → 17:15 Tea Break

17:15 → 17:30 Announcements

Saturday 28 March

08:45 → 09:00 Announcements

09:00 → 09:30 Keynote: USIU

Keynote speech

Convener: Gabriel Okello (USIU - Africa)

09:30 → 10:00 Bridging Native C++ Infrastructure with Distributed Data Platforms

What happens when high-performance native systems require secure, distributed access to modern large-scale data processing infrastructure?

This talk covers an open-source C++ client implementation built on the Spark Connect protocol, enabling Native Systems to communicate with remote Spark clusters using gRPC and Protobuf.

The talk explores:
- The architecture of Spark Connect and its decoupled client-server model
- Designing a secure, distributed query interface from native C++
- Authentication and production deployment considerations
- Leveraging gRPC for structured remote execution
- Packaging and building the client for Ubuntu & other Linux environments (Linux Package distribution)
- The role of open standards in expanding big data ecosystems

All these aspects demonstrate how systems-level engineering can integrate directly with cloud-native data platforms while preserving performance, portability, and security.

By extending Spark access beyond JVM and Python, this project enables integration with embedded systems, financial engines, scientific computing workloads, and other performance-sensitive environments.

The goal is not to replace existing Spark APIs but to expand the ecosystem through open-source, cross-language interoperability.

Speaker: Irfan Ghat

10:00 → 10:30 Are we making it easy for new contributors to grow?

Open source communities are very good at helping people make their first contribution, but many struggle with what happens after onboarding. New contributors often join with excitement, complete an initial task, and then lose direction because the next steps are unclear.

This talk explores how communities can design clearer contributor pathways—from first contribution to long-term growth.

Using practical experience from community work in the Fedora Project and mentorship programs like Outreachy, I will discuss real onboarding gaps and how communities can fix them with simple structural improvements.

We will cover:

• How contributors typically discover open source projects
• Common drop-off points after onboarding
• How mentorship and documentation influence retention
• Practical models for helping contributors grow into maintainers and community leaders

This session focuses especially on emerging open-source ecosystems in Kenya and similar regions, where interest in open source is rapidly growing but contributor pathways are still evolving.

Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for:

• Structuring beginner-friendly contribution workflows
• Building contributor growth ladders
• Creating sustainable community support systems

The goal is simple:
Communities should not only make it easy to join—but also easy to stay and grow.

Speaker: Cornelius Emase

10:30 → 11:00 Morning tea break

11:00 → 11:30 Keynote: Ubuntu Kenya

Keynote speech

Conveners: Chris Achinga (Community Member), Doreen Nangira

11:30 → 12:00 RTOS in Linux without PREEMPT_RT: Having your Cake and Eating it too

Any builder and developer who enjoys going down the rabbit hole at the intersection of software and hardware in embedded systems, will eventually find themselves judging if their current task/project should be implemented using an RTOS or a custom linux kernel with the PREEMPT_RT patch set. The decision they make almost always is not guided by the nature of the project/ problem they are currently solving, but on what they find to be the easy path. If they have previously built a custom kernel with the PREEMPT_RT patch set for their hardware and have no RTOS experience, they will do the same. The opposite is also true. The exception comes if they have done both, and from personal experience, their decision will be guided by the merits each approach brings to the table with regards to the particular problem they are solving.

Two-three years ago I was building a custom drone firmware, but from a model predictive control point of view instead of the classic PID tuning approach. I came at the problem from an RTOS point of view, and needless to say, while a microcontroller works perfectly with an RTOS, it is at the end of the day an extremely resource constrained device. As a result, I put the project on a brief hiatus. Last year, after discovering that I could compile a custom kernel for the Raspberry Pi with the PREEMPT_RT patch set, I realized that I now had the right primitives to revisit the problem, however, I ran into an immediate problem. A real-time linux kernel is very powerful, but the challenge of managing kernel configuration, maintaining compatibility across hardware types and revisions quickly shift the focus away from building my project and towards maintaining infrastructure.

But what if real-time performance didn’t require turning Linux itself into an RTOS? This talk proposes an alternative architectural pattern: distribute time-critical responsibilities to dedicated microcontroller-based nodes, and leave Linux to do the high-level orchestration, networking, UI, and asynchronous processing. Building on this kernel of the idea, this project and talk are inspired by the klipper firmware that runs on most 3d printers, where real-time workloads (those that have hard timing guarantees) run on microcontrollers like the Raspberry Pi Pico or ESP32, each running a lightweight RTOS, while a Linux SBC coordinates the system, aggregates data, handles networking, and runs all high level logic without requiring PREEMPT_RT. This way, you can have real-time guarantees and still keep/eat your cake

Speaker: Machar Kook

12:00 → 12:10 Micro-transactions at Scale: Solving the "Penny-Switching" Problem in Open Source Finance

Speaker: Brooke Stanley Agina (USIU - Africa)

12:10 → 12:20 The future of AI and robotics in African Markets

Speaker: Yvonne Gachara (USIU - Africa)

12:20 → 12:30 Digibiashara

Speaker: Ilyas Bourzat (USIU - Africa)

12:30 → 13:00 Keynote: Canonical - The career code AI can't write

Keynote speech

Convener: Sebastian Trzcinski-Clément

13:00 → 14:00 Lunch break

14:00 → 14:30 Building an Open-Source Community from Scratch in Kenya: Lessons from Salamander Tech Hub

Starting a tech community is easy. Sustaining one is difficult.

In 2025, Salamander Tech Hub began as a small grassroots initiative focused on Git, GitHub, and open source fundamentals. With no funding, limited infrastructure, and a volunteer driven team, we set out to create a space where young developers could move from learning tools to contributing to real projects.

Within a year, we hosted recurring technical sessions, partnered with external speakers, and organized our first physical event, Wajenzi Hack 1.0. Along the way, we faced familiar challenges in emerging ecosystems: inconsistent participation, contribution gaps, volunteer fatigue, and sustainability concerns.

This talk presents a practical, experience driven framework for building early stage open source communities in resource constrained environments. It covers attracting the first members, designing contribution pathways beyond workshops, building partnerships, measuring meaningful engagement, and maintaining momentum after the excitement of initial events fades.

Attendees will leave with actionable strategies, cautionary lessons, and a replicable model for starting and growing community driven open source initiatives.

14:30 → 15:00 Automating Drone Simulation with Nix, Containers, and ROS

In this talk, I’ll demonstrate how to set up a reproducible drone simulation environment using MAVLink, and ROS, with two powerful options for automation: Nix and Docker containers. We’ll cover how to set up the simulation stack, visualize missions in Gazebo, and run automated tests—using either Nix for a fully declarative setup or containers for an isolated environment.

You’ll see how to create a consistent, reproducible setup that works across different machines, whether you prefer the precision of Nix or the flexibility of containers. I’ll show how to run simulated drone missions, visualize in Gazebo, and run tests within these environments to validate autonomous behavior.

Speaker: Mark Ngugi

15:00 → 16:45 Workshop - Kenya Flying Labs (Room LT3, School of Science)

Breakout room: LT3

Speaker: Cleopa Otieno

15:00 → 16:45 Workshop: Beyond Code - Git and GitHub enterprise operations (Room LT5, School of Science)

Speaker: Prof. John Ahenda (USIU - Africa)

15:00 → 16:45 Workshop: OpenStack Contribution Academy - Make your first OpenStack contribution (Room LT2, School of Business)

Speaker: Abby Nduta (OpenInfra User Group)

16:45 → 17:15 Evening tea break

17:15 → 17:45 Lightning Talks: Day 2

17:45 → 18:00 Closing: Vote of thanks and closing remarks

Convener: Dr Patrick Wamuyu (USIU - Africa)