Community Spotlight: Meet Sagir from Nigeria

Welcome to our Community Spotlight series, where we bring to you real stories from members of the global Crowdsource community.

Today, we are excited to shine a spotlight on Mohammed Sagir Adamu or just Sagir as he is fondly called. He is one of the pioneers of the Crowdsource community in Nigeria.

This year, Crowdsource Nigeria community is marking its sixth anniversary. Sagir is one of the top contributors and one of the most passionate influencers from the region. Sagir juggles a day job, 3 kids and several family responsibilities. Despite that, he takes out the time to contribute to Crowdsource and grow his local community. Sagir’s love for his country and people is visible in the powerful mantra that he lives by: “Nigeria may have been left behind, but by no means will I let it be left out”.

In this blog post, Sagir shares his personal journey and experiences with Crowdsource, from just being a hit-and-miss contributor to becoming a trailblazer influencer.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I currently live in Abuja (the capital city of Nigeria) with my wife Houwa and 3 kids. I used to live in Lagos before this, which is the largest metropolis in Nigeria.
Though my higher education has been in Mathematics and Computer Sciences, I shifted gears a bit early on and have moved into Environmental Sciences. I am actually about to complete my masters in Environmental studies this year. In terms of careers, I have been a firefighter for 12 years. Post that I moved into occupational health for a year. I am working currently as a Health Safety and Environment advisor for an organization where I aspire to become the CEO in the future.

Tell us about how your journey with Crowdsource began.

I stumbled upon Crowdsource just out of pure curiosity. I started making contributions but I gave up on it very soon. One of the fellow community influencers was the one who brought me back to the platform. She told me that making contributions here would assist all Google products to improve performance and gain accessibility across the world.
As we started making more meaningful contributions, we asked ourselves, why not build a community for the country? Thus began the journey of us - Three Musketeers - building this Crowdsource community representing Nigeria.
We leveraged the Local Guide community for Google Maps which we already had access to. From there we broadened our scope to more people. I view Crowdsource as the mother of all Google applications, because if you make a contribution to this platform, you are also improving the functionality of at least 10 different Google applications.
We decided to advocate and spread the word, building on the community's strength, thus the journey began and it has been ongoing and gaining strength.

What does Crowdsource mean to you? What motivates you to be a Crowdsource influencer ?

Crowdsource is an extremely powerful tool. Even without the knowledge in coding or programming, one could still contribute meaningfully towards machine learning. Being an end-user, I know that whatever I’m contributing here, I'm reaping the benefits as well.
The other aspect of the platform is that I can showcase my country and its culture to the world. I have observed that in Google Image Search there is limited data about African culture and I believe by contributing more I can bring our culture to a wider audience. The audience may not know the language we speak, yet they will be able to know about our country and culture.

What makes your local community special?

Creating and growing a community is not easy in today’s world because most people believe that we need to be paid for any work that we do. Crowdsource contributions are voluntary. We have to, time and again, reiterate the fact that what we are doing here is for our community, and in the long run our future generations will be benefiting from this work. Google provides us all these apps for free and as end-users we only stand to gain. It is a difficult narrative to sell, but by constant efforts and reaching out to people personally and otherwise, we are trying our best to grow our community.
What is unique about our local community is the fact that most people are willing to contribute selflessly, without thinking about monetary aspects. They firmly believe in the idea that by our constant efforts we will be able to project our small but rich and diverse culture to the world outside. The similarity of views and beliefs is what binds us together and helps us achieve our goals.

What comes to your mind when you hear Quality Contribution (on Crowdsource)?

I always believe in the motto ‘Quality over quantity’. I keep telling my community members not to look at the leaderboard when they make their contributions, but to make sure that whatever they are able to contribute is accurate.
It's simple; what we feed the system is what we will get back, so even if we were to make fewer contributions, to do it right would be a quality contribution. At the end of the day, we are the end user, as Mahatma Gandhi says “Be the change that you want to see in the world”.

What is the one thing you’ll do this year to spread awareness about quality contribution in your local community?

I always set goals for myself and the community every year, so that we are working towards a common objective. My goals are never towards leveling up in terms of contributions or appearing on top of the leaderboard, what I would like to do more is to spread the gospel of Crowdsource to more people. In doing so, I aim to grow a healthy community where we can learn from each other not only limited to the platform, but also in ways of life.
I am very proud to say that by our efforts in conducting meet-ups and events, we have been able to get more people to join the community, and what I had set to achieve this year has been at least 80-90% achieved thus far. I not only arrange meet-ups and events, but I also try to attend as many events as possible in this direction. Even if I have limited time at hand, I make it a point to share my insights with the community and do not let go of any platform to do this.