Introducing VillageHack 1.0, probably the first Hackathon in an African Village

Things are still in the pipeline, but I'm working with my awesome folks at Beyonde Labs and Deveint Ltd to make this happen this December 27, 2014.

A bit of some quick and rough background. Way back in 2010, I started off an initiative (with the help of Web Tribe Ltd, where I was working then) to put my village online. The project called Lugulu.net. The raw code (then by a young amateur developer) is now on GitHub and it's kinda making a SOS distress call, I need maintainers and guys who can help push to the next level - putting all African Villages online. This will be one of the challenges in the Hackathon.

I opened a Facebook Profile and Twitter Page, which are fairly inactive now. With the help of two good friends and fellow villagers, Charles Khisa and Michael Murumba, we set up a Facebook Group at the same time, and started inviting other villagers to join in. We've seen it grow from 3 to now 550 members as per today. At that time, we ambitiously said it's the only village Facebook Group in the world ;-) It's a good pride to have but we wish to see this across other African Villages.

Now welcome #VillageHack 1.0, happening on 27th December 2014 at Lugulu Village. A pleasant village in Western Kenya, where some of us were born and bred. Next year, we wish to see this happen in at least 20 other villages across Africa, perhaps on the same day - call it #VillageHackDay.

 
This upcoming event will mainly entail:

• Programming Bootcamp - we'll be teaching interested folks (esp High School leavers), Python, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
• Tech Talks
• Hackathon for mature devs - mainly building technologies for the village by the villagers.

So, that is it for now, but I'll keep you posted on the development.

If you wish to sponsor the event, or you can give any leads, feel free to shoot us an email. Also, if you wish to participate (in teaching, hackathon or tech talk), let me know, we can help facilitate your accommodation, that's what villages are known for :-)