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LAURENCE MORONEY: Welcome to the Googleplex.
This is an incredible place with lots of great stuff being
worked on every single day.
Before I worked here, I always wondered
what it would be like to come to the Googleplex,
meet up with a Googler, and have coffee with them,
and just chat about what they do, how they do it,
and why they do it.
And today we're going to do exactly that.
Welcome to this episode of "Coffee with a Googler."
Today I have a very special guest joining me.
Emeka has come all the way from Nigeria.
And Emeka, he's a program manager in sub-Saharan Africa
responsible for working with developers
in that part of the world.
Now, he's also been working on this awesome project which
has been about taking developer content that's typically
only available online and making it available to developers
offline.
So Emeka, welcome and thanks for joining us.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Thank you for having me, Laurence.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, you're very welcome.
It's just a real treat to have you here today.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: It's a great day on campus
and it's great to be here.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So tell us about this project.
Is it "cay-sa?"
Is that how I pronounce it?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Project Kesaa, yeah.
So "kesaa" is an Igbo word.
It's a language spoken in southeastern Nigeria.
"Kesaa" means to distribute or to share something that
gets to everybody, everyone.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: The project was actually
born out of the work we're doing in sub-Saharan Africa
working with the developer ecosystem there.
And while doing this, we found out
that, yes, Google does have a lot of great developer content.
But this content is mostly online.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: And by developer content,
I mean stuff like the tutorials, the videos, documentation,
installation files, and stuff like that.
This content is mostly available online.
But then you find out that in sub-Saharan Africa,
a lot of the people have internet
that is either too expensive, or unreliable, or in some cases,
nonexistent.
Right?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: So these developers
find it pretty hard to get access to this content.
So we asked ourselves, is there a way
that we can get this content to them in a way that is
offline-friendly, so to speak.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: So we tested our idea first,
with a small pilot where we just had about 500 DVDs.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: And we got some of this content
on the DVDs.
And we ran a pilot with a few developers.
And the response was amazing.
They loved it.
So we decided to take it a step further.
And we actually got a lot of content,
about 32 gigs of content, what we call the software developer
offline kit.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
Nice and compact.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yeah, very compact.
This one is a USB format.
It has 32 gigs of data.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sweet.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: And on it, we
had stuff like-- we had the entire Android developer
website here.
We had the Google Cloud documentation.
We had all the software developer kits for Android
and cloud here.
We had documentation on material design.
We had videos for cloud and Android
from Google I/O and the Google Developers channel.
And also, very importantly, we had the Udacity course videos.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So like the Android fundamentals,
the scalable, all that stuff.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yeah, all that good stuff.
And we invited people who were interested in joining us
in this pilot to apply to get one of these kits.
And we were actually blown away by the number
of applications we got.
We got about 4,000 people.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: You know, these responses
came from all over the world.
In fact, one of them I found particularly interesting
was this guy who, he works on a boat on the North
Sea for two weeks--
LAURENCE MORONEY: On a boat?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: --and he's on land for another two weeks.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, wow.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: And while he's on the boat,
I think he writes code.
So he didn't have access to all this content,
because internet was a challenge on the boat.
So he requested that we send him the kit so that he could use it
while writing code on the boat.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Do you know what he was building?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: I have no idea what he was building.
I would love to find out myself.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Well, if you're watching on this,
please just leave us a comment below so you can tell us
what it was that you built. Because we
would love to know what you did while you
were on the boat in the middle of the North Sea.
You've had folks from all over the world downloading it.
What kind of results did you get?
What kind of numbers did you have?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: We do know, at this point,
that at least 4,000 people are actively
using the content in over 100 countries.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yeah, so that's quite interesting.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And that's the one's that you know.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: That's the ones we know.
Because obviously, this content is used mostly offline.
So we don't know anything about what goes on offline.
But when they use it while connected to a computer,
we can tell through Google Analytics--
LAURENCE MORONEY: I see.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: --that it's being used.
And we're going on to actually spread this even more.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool, cool.
And this content, it's like twice a year you do it?
So you produce new content.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yes, we try to do it twice a year.
So in fact, there is another one due in the next few weeks.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice, I look forward to it.
So hopefully some of my content will be in there.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yeah, definitely.
Definitely will be in there.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now your target developers, originally--
even though you reach global-- but your original target
developers were sub-Saharan, Nigerian, that kind of thing.
Could you tell us a little bit about developers
in that part of the world?
What's the profile of a developer there like?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: The profile of a developer
in sub-Saharan Africa is one that
has been evolving over the past few years.
So in the last six years or so, the ecosystem
in sub-Saharan Africa has come to realize
the value of the internet, not just as a channel for reaching
their customers or end users, but also as a growth engine
for empowering themselves economically,
and financially, and so on.
Because of this explosion in the last few years,
many of these startups who have built products
that are actually gaining traction
find themselves in a situation where
they need to get new talent or they need to expand their team.
And the demand actually way outstrips the supply.
So that's actually what keeps me awake
at night, trying to figure out ways to grow the talent pool,
upskill more developers for these startups to hire
and continue doing what they're doing.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And then these startups
are a great contributor to the economy as they go forward,
right?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yes, yes.
A lot of them are doing very great things.
For example, ecommerce recently took off.
In Nigeria, there's a company called Conga, for example.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: I think they started in the last year
and a half, two years ago.
And they recently launched their Android app last year,
right in time for the holiday shopping season.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: And it was a really big hit for them,
because it helped a lot of people who are mainly
on their mobile phones to place orders and have
these orders fulfilled.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Folks that aren't aware of it,
in sub-Saharan Africa, the desktop revolution kind
of passed by, right?
People have really gone straight to mobile.
So ecommerce is mobile first.
It's mobile only rather than mobile first--
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Well yes, exactly.
LAURENCE MORONEY: --primarily.
So as a result then, somebody like that
can be really successful for the economy as a whole.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yes, indeed.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
Now, I understand one of the things you've also
been working on is design, and design language,
and helping mobile developers to design in user-centric ways.
What efforts have been putting forward in that?
Could you share?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yes.
So with the internet-- the evolution
of the internet as a channel and as a growth engine-- one
challenge that has come up in sub-Saharan Africa,
and indeed, many major market countries,
is the lack of locally relevant content.
You know, there isn't enough of this locally relevant content
online.
And for the internet to be useful to people
in these regions, they have to find
something that is useful to them that was built for them.
LAURENCE MORONEY: For them-- yeah, exactly.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: So a lot of the content online right now
was built here in Silicon Valley, or in Europe,
or wherever, and wasn't built for they
user in sub-Saharan Africa.
So what we're trying to get the ecosystem to do now
is to do what Google does, right,
to focus on the user-- in this case,
the African user-- to build for that user
by integrating principles of user
centered design in their product development process.
So what we did was, starting last year,
we started running a series of UX master classes,
as we call them.
The whole idea was to introduce these principles of UX design
to developers, product managers, project managers, and so on--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: --so that they
can apply this to the tools and the products
that they're building.
And we just had the second iteration of that this year,
where we focused on teams that had new product ideas
and teams that had existing products that
were trying to iterate to get the next version out.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Got it.
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: And the result
has been quite encouraging.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Now I understand, recently,
in your country, there was an election.
And technology played a great big part.
And Android, and App Engine, and other stuff
played a part in that.
Could you tell us a little about it?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yes.
The 2015 elections in Nigeria were quite unique
for a lot of reasons.
And one of them was the role that technology and social
played in the entire process.
But before the polls themselves, there was this concern
that there would be some form of voter apathy,
that people wouldn't come out to vote.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And you can't have democracy without voters,
right?
CHUKWUEMEKA AFIGBO: Yeah.
I mean, you just can't.
So one of the things we did was to run
a campaign called the Pledge to Vote campaign
where people went to a website that was powered by Google
Cloud and they pledged to vote.
So when you did that, you get a badge generated for you
with your name.
And you can automatically share this
on the social platform of your choice
and challenge your friends to also go and pledge to vote.
So that was quite successful.
We also had various Google+ Hangouts where a number
of the candidates actually engaged people, the press,
the public on their manifesto and stuff like that.
So it was quite interesting, the role that technology played.
And I think the country was better off for it.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's good to hear.
And I know there was a great blog post on Google Africa.
We'll post a link to it here.
And so one the things with elections
is elections are quite close to being universal.
But we can learn a lot from what you guys did
in Nigeria, hopefully for our elections next year.
Emeka visited us all the way from Nigeria.
And he shared these amazing stories
of just the breadth of things that developers
are doing, all because of content that you're
able to give them offline.
So thank you so much, Emeka.
Thank you again, everybody.
If you have any questions for me,
just leave them in the comments below.
And if you have any questions for Emeka,
please also leave them in the comments below.
And don't forget to subscribe to the Google Developers
channel for more great episodes of "Coffee with a Googler."
Thank you.
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