Building Bridges Through Code: Hiero Comes to Kampala

Hiero's diversity program exists to intentionally diversify participation. Hiero's goal is to broaden who gets to build the foundation of decentralized technology in a long-lasting way.

Hiero's contributor base has historically leaned toward corporate contributors. Companies pay engineers, engineers contribute, and the cycle continues. However, this means that brilliant individual developers often never find their entry point. That's the gap the program sets out to close.

Why Kampala

We held an event in Kampala, Uganda, during the week of April, hosting lectures and workshops at Bugema University and Makerere University. These two institutions are home to technically curious and highly capable students.

The sessions covered Hiero, the Linux Foundation, and distributed ledger technology more broadly. The technical content was the easy part. The harder, more important conversation focused on what open source actually is and what it can mean for a young developer's life. We wanted students to walk out understanding three things:

Open source is a bridge. The code you write in Kampala can run in Berlin, Tokyo, or San Francisco the same day. You don't need permission, and you don't need to leave home to participate. The maintainers of the projects you depend on are reachable. The communities are real. The door is open in a way it rarely is in proprietary software.

Open source is a career. Through the LFX Mentorship Program, individual contributions, and visible work on real projects, open source is one of the most direct paths into the global tech industry. We shared concrete examples: how early pull requests led to mentorships, how mentorships led to commit access, and how commit access led to job offers from companies across the world.

Open source has standards. We openly discussed “AI slop,” the difference between meaningful contributions and noise, and how to start the right way: picking good first issues, reading code before writing it, and understanding a project before opening a pull request. The community is generous, but it expects craft in return.

The People in the Room

The workshops in Kampala were run by developers from Kampala. These are engineers who, through their work in Eclipse Foundation and Linux Foundation projects, are now committers and in some cases maintainers on Hiero itself. They earn their living from open-source work.

That detail matters more than any slide deck. When a student at Makerere watches someone from their own city explain how they became a maintainer on a global ledger project, the message is no longer “this is possible somewhere.” The message is “this is possible here, and the person telling you knows the road because they walked it.”

You cannot manufacture that kind of credibility. You can only support the people already doing the work and give them the platform to bring others along.

What Comes Next?

The Kampala event is one step. Hiero's diversity program is helping build a structure where individual contributors can find their way into the project, get mentored, and stay involved. We're focused on making the on-ramp visible: clearer good first issues, more accessible documentation, mentorship pairings, and continued in-person engagement in regions that have historically been underrepresented in the project.

Africa is one of the most exciting places in the world for software right now. The talent is there. The hunger is there. What's often missing is the bridge. Bridges are exactly what open source was built to be.

To the students at Bugema and Makerere who showed up, asked sharp questions, and have already started filing their first issues: welcome. Hiero is better with you in it.

And to the Kampala developers who led these sessions: thank you. You are the proof that this works.

---

Want to be featured on the Hiero website?

Follow this link to contribute: Discord Guide