Osisi
A web-based platform that helps African families preserve and celebrate their heritage through visual, interactive family trees.
Tools Used
React
TypeScript
Tailwind
Cloudflare
Convex
Auth0
Resend
DESCRIPTION
About the project
Role: Creator
Project Overview
- Osisi is a platform that helps African families preserve and celebrate their heritage through visual, interactive family trees. It combines storytelling, genealogy, and technology to make it easy for users to build multi-generational family structures and share their family’s legacy with others. The mission is to make every African family's story visible and preserved for future generations.
The Problem
- Lack of accessible tools for documenting and visualizing African family histories in culturally relevant ways.
- Manual family tree creation methods (pen and paper, spreadsheets) lacked interactivity, scalability, and emotional impact.
- Missing infrastructure for sharing and collaborating on family trees digitally, especially across generations and locations.
The Solution
- Designed and built a performant web application that lets users visually construct family trees with photos, relationships, and stories.
- Integrated Cloudinary to handle image uploads and processing, allowing families to preserve family member photos across generations.
- Implemented a custom tree rendering engine using p5.js and TypeScript to handle complex, large-scale family visualizations.
- Built collaboration features and family groups to allow multiple users to contribute to the same family structure.
- Set up infrastructure for eventual physical product generation (scrolls, photo albums) and premium features through subscriptions.
The Result
- Successfully launched alpha version with early adopters who built multi-generational family trees and gave positive feedback.
- Enabled users to upload and visualize dozens of family members in real-time with performant rendering even on mobile.
- Reduced friction in documenting family history, especially for elders who participated in the interview-led onboarding experience.
- Established foundation for monetization through physical product sales and digital premium features.