Walking into the studio and proceeding to greet everyone with a disarming smile, a compliment and a handshake, Paul’s inviting nature makes even the coldest heart thaw. With a joke accompanying every question and the immediate switch to seriousness, Paul’s overarching love for his community is so evident, one can tell that this is second nature to him. He speaks on the sense of fulfillment he and his team gets when it comes to grooming tech talent in Nairobi.
“Our greatest achievement is when we see a junior developer move from being that to becoming a senior developer, and then a founder, co-founder or even a CMO,” he says with laughter punctuating his sentence. Paul’s desire to see his community members grow fueled his partnership with Propel, which also led to his community becoming the first in Kenya to get into a partnership with Propel.
For this edition of our community spotlight series, we had a sit down with Paul Tiberius Kangara, the Partnerships Lead of the Google Developers Group in Nairobi to discuss the challenges faced, lessons learned and benefits accrued from building his community. Here’s what he had to say.
Q. Can we meet you?
Hi, my name is Paul Tiberius Kangara and I lead the partnerships team at the Google Developers Group in Nairobi, Kenya.
Q: Tell us about your community
My community was created to train developers in the various Google programming languages and frameworks such as Android, Kotlin and many more. Basically, every single programming language or framework used to develop all of Google’s products. It started off from the student groups, and then morphed into the regional community groups; although, we still have the student groups, as that's where the first level of training happens.
Q: What specific challenges has your community faced and how were you able to overcome them?
So, one of the major challenges we have is getting developers to come for training. We have cases where we create training programs for these developers across our different communities. Despite having over 1000 developers within the community, only about 50 or 100 people actually partake in these training sessions. It also works as an advantage for us because, with a lesser number, we can properly train them and monitor their progress.
Q. What’s one memorable event you’ve had as a community?
(laughs) Wow! December 2022 - I think this was one of the biggest events we’ve ever had. We had 4000 developers in attendance and 20 partners from different countries. It was also the first time we were meeting Propel and we even had a Propel rep, Andie (Head of Talent & Recruitment) lead a session. You could feel the desire of the developers to learn and grow as many of them came from different locations just to glean wisdom from those who had come to speak. I remember going into the room where Andie was speaking and the room was full, completely packed. It was amazing and remains one of the most memorable events we’ve ever had.
Also - when we had the expansion to other parts of Kenya like Kisii, Mombasa where we got to see developers with the urge to learn and grow was fascinating.
Q. What are your key achievements as a community?
For us, it’s the ability to tap into talent and growth. And to see these developers move from being a junior developer to becoming a senior developer or a founder, a co-founder or even a CMO (laughs). It is also to see these developers go ahead and start their own communities just by watching how we organize ourselves and our events. We hear stories like “I used to be in GDG Nairobi, but I have gone and started API kenya or Nairobi Devops.” It is amazing to hear.
Another thing I would say is “JOBS”. People have gotten tons of jobs by attending community events and networking. There’s also the support they experience in their career journey. We recently had someone in the Android 425 community (a community started out of GDG Nairobi) talk about how he had issues with a code he was running and when he presented it in the community, he got the guidance that he needed and was able to fix his code. For me, it shows how the power of community has helped people.
Q. What’s one community growth hack you swear by?
(Laughs) For me, it is empowering people. Focus on empowering people and grooming them in their career and watch how much growth your community would experience.
Q. What’s one advice you would give to a community lead or manager like yourself?
Have a structure. Create a structure for running your community and evaluating your members’ skillset. When we started getting partners, one of the many questions they used to ask us is how many developers do you have and how many are seniors and how many are juniors? At the beginning , it used to be difficult answering this question, because we didn’t have a structure, but now we do, and it has made it so much easier.
Q. What has been the highlight of your partnership with Propel?
My partnership with Propel started in 2022. I was the first person to bring Propel to Kenya, and I am very proud of it! (laughs). One of the highlights of our partnership started from the first call: when we got introduced and Wamide (Ecosystem and Partnerships Lead) met us and started asking us questions about the number strength of our community, and started explaining the benefits of Propel, and then I realized that we need them. It’s one thing to have a community, but you need to be able to measure their growth, sustainability, and impact. After the meeting with Propel, I went back to my team and said “My problems are solved”. When Propel came on board, the database curation and jobs feature helped solve some of the problems we were having. It’s amazing how much we’ve been able to accomplish by just having them as partners.
Want to be our next Community of the Month? Then use our “Buy Now, Pay Later” feature to win. Here’s what you get when you become our Community of the Month:
- A collaborative video post on all our social media platforms
- A sponsored blog post
- A sponsored post of your community and benefits
- Free merch!
So, what are you waiting for? Visit app.propel.community to explore the prospects! The community with the highest number of BNPL users wins!
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