Community Coding

The first two Community Coding sessions were a little light on numbers, but the third was well attended, and I’m hoping for a similar number for the fourth and final workshop.

We had two really good outcomes of this workshop:

Project Acceptance

At the very first workshop the participant and I came up with a smallish project using the OLPCs that would help utilise The Edge a bit better. I was very happy that this project was agreed to enthusiastically by everyone at the third workshop, and am happy to charge ahead with it now.

The project is a simple checkin service for The Edge bays, utilising the library cards already handed out by The Edge staff. The OLPCs will be used to update and view the checkins of those around you, and is aimed to increase serendipitous meetings and collaboration at The Edge.

Ongoing Community

It became clear that the workshops had filled a gap for the participants, a supportive place for beginners where it didn’t matter how much experience you had. The general thrust is that we’re going to keep the small community started by these workshops going, in both a physical and virtual sense.

A lot of technical groups around Brisbane are focussed on one particular technology, and a lot of them are targeting experts, and can be hostile to neophytes. The Community Coding workshops were really designed at all levels of ability, and it’s that spirit I wish to continue with.

Library:/hack

Last weekend I helped out with Libraryhack, a national competition put on by state libraries to encourage the use of openly available data in mash up applications.

My local branch, The Edge, put on a 24 hour coding jam event complete with top notch speakers from Google, Microsoft and the library itself.

We had a reasonable turnout for the public events, but only a small turnout for the rest of the evening. Despite the low numbers, I was floored by the outcomes, four very impressive mash up applications that could easily be put into the national competition.

I was asked to help run the fun stream of the night, which, well, didn’t fit too comfortably. However, I did come up with some simple, geeky events that didn’t stress the brain too much.

Overall I was happy to be involved, and handled the all-night aspect fairly well.