Events text

[jancborchardt]

AfricaHackTrip is a group of developers and designers from Europe visiting East Africa in September/October 2013. We have been coworking with people from all over the world, but not yet with hackers from the growing African tech scene. We want to meet, connect and share with our peers in East Africa. The goal is to get the international tech community excited about African hackers and to kick off continuous exchange and establish networks.

Our main interests and skills are web technology, open source community and mobile devices, so we chose these as umbrella topics for the events. We are also fans of Firefox OS, which is why we will present it and bring phones. With Geeksphone, GitHub and Mozilla we have strong partners on board.

To get in touch with the local community, we want to organize 2-day events at each location. On the first day, the focus will be on discussion and community bonding, on the second day, we will collaborate and work together on projects which are important to us.

Day 1: Unconference

We want to know and share how people work, connect and exchange:

• What do people work on?
• Which projects/problems are relevant?
• How can we collaborate?

The first hour is reserved for a quick word on what AfricaHackTrip is, an introductory round so people get to know each other, writing ideas for topics on pieces of paper and then vote for a few that can be worked on in groups.

Day 2: Hackathon

We want to work together on interesting projects. We’re hackers and like to create solutions for real problems, making the world a better place.

Usually at a hackathon you start from scratch to build something small in a short amount of time. But we think the results could be more sustainable if we work on existing, real-world projects. That’s why we encourage participants to present projects they're working on and look for others to join their efforts. Starting from scratch is of course also fine.

Before or during the hackathon we can also have short talks or workshops to learn together. This depends on the location and what we feel fits better from what we saw on the first day.

The events are sponsored by GitHub. We will also bring Firefox OS devices generously donated by Geeksphone. They can be used for testing and developing apps. We intend on giving them to the local community after the events, for example donating to the local hacker- and coworkingspaces.

[jancborchardt]

(History and old discussion stuff I wrote up with @xMartin is at http://titanpad.com/africahacktrip-events )

[gr2m]

Can we close this now?

[xMartin]

I created texts for the Kampala events: https://github.com/AfricaHackTrip/africahacktrip.github.io/wiki/Invite-Kampala-1 https://github.com/AfricaHackTrip/africahacktrip.github.io/wiki/Invite-Kampala-2

I thought it would be good to have two separate descriptions when having two venues. But I realized everyone else went with the one text so maybe that is ok. Please check it out.

I also incorporated some feedback from Bumi and some own ideas into the texts.

Which one do you think is better for places with separate events? Maybe having only one text is better to show the events can be connected.

[gr2m]

I'm sorry I can't review it until Tuesday / Wednesday I fear. I'll try but I can't promise, I'm too much behind with client work that needs to get done before I leave. Please reach out to the people directly that you want to have a look at it.

[jancborchardt]

Just for the record, I let @xMartin know that I really like his texts.

I also think it’s good if the events text for the different locations are slightly varied. That way it feels organic and honest instead of overplanned and generic.