Janine Van Niekerk
Change Capability Architect at MTN
Gauteng, South Africa
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJanine Van Niekerk is a Change Capability Architect and AI transformation leader with nine years of focused experience driving people-centred digital change across 19 African OpCos at MTN. She blends deep risk and program management roots from senior roles at Vodacom and RISK2INNOV8 with academic rigour—a PhD in Information Systems—to design advanced learning journeys and AI academies that democratise skills. Known for treating change as a playground, she couples talent cultivation with pragmatic governance, privacy (POPI) and security practice to ensure technology adoption sticks. Hands-on technically as well—she contributes backend code to open-source projects like the python-discord Sir Lancebot—so she understands both developer workflows and enterprise transformation. Janine’s uncommon strength is translating complex analytics and AI capability into scalable, people-first learning experiences that unlock latent talent across the continent. Based in Gauteng, she is passionate about accelerating inclusive growth through practical, heart-and-mind focused change.
9 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Information Systems / Innovation, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Information Systems / Innovation at University of Cape TownBachelor of Commerce (BCom) Computer and Information Sciences and Industrial Psyhology, Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) Computer and Information Sciences and Industrial Psyhology at UNISA
Github Skills (6)
discord-py10
bots10
python10
discord-bot10
googlebot10
redis9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
python-discord/sir-lancebot
Dec 2020 - Nov 2022
A Discord bot started as a community project for Hacktoberfest 2018, later evolved to an introductory project for aspiring new developers starting out with open source development.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:41 reviews, 49 commits, 7 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:Janine's commits primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the Sir Lancebot Discord bot, specifically concerning the Advent of Code (AoC) features. They added and modified commands related to AoC notifications, linking Discord accounts to AoC names, and managing channel restrictions for specific commands. The user also refactored and updated code to align with new coding styles and improved error handling within the bot's AoC extension. This involved changes to the bot's internal evaluation features.
pythondiscordbotdiscord-botintroductory
oSTEM/lovelace
Nov 2020 - Jun 2021
oSTEM's custom Discord bot, Lovelace. Currently in an alpha state with major rewrites and reorganization to come.
Contributions:3 reviews, 10 commits, 1 PR in 7 months
discord-jsrewriteslovelacediscordbot
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