UNESCO Hackathon in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Join UNESCO Hackathon in Ho Chi Minh City on Oct 13 -14, 2018 to learn about climate change and environmental challenges in Vietnam, meet regional sustainable development experts and listen to their successful startup stories by doing sustainable and green businesses.

There is no restriction of age or backgrounds of participants. Students, NGOs reps, journalists, bloggers, developers and all open source contributors are invited to join! The hackathon is open for all and awesome prizes are waiting for you!

Each winner of the three top teams will receive these prizes.

The objective of the hackathon is to propose innovative solutions that help journalists to monitor and report on climate change and sustainable development issues in Asia and the Pacific.

The participants will be introduced to UNESCO’s Guidebook for Journalists Reporting on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific which includes information and knowledge on climate science, related international and regional treaties and policy frameworks including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development, and tips for journalists for finding and telling stories.

Time and Location

Time: Saturday October 13 – Sunday October 14, 2018
Location: Officience Vietnam, 16A Le Hong Phong, Ward 12, District 10, Ho Chi Minh City

Why should I participate?

  • Learn how to create a chatbot within an hour with SUSI.AI
  • Carry out experiment with electronic devices PSlab.io
  • Update yourselves with knowledge of technology and sustainable development in Vietnam
  • Meet special guest speakers from the UNESCO, Embassy of Sweden and many more.
  • Improve your language skills, presentation skills and build up your leadership abilities
  • Receive certificates from UNESCO, T-shirts, swags, and special prizes from the sponsors

How do I know if I am qualified to join?

The hackathon is open for everyone, especially for those:

  • Curious and willing to learn new things
  • Interested in technology and sustainable development
  • Like to make new friends and expand their networks
  • Able to communicate in English
  • No prior coding skill is required

How do I sign up?

  1. Get your ticket to the Event on eventyay.com
  2. Sign up on Devpost as you will need to submit your final hack there.
  3. Join the Gitter channel at https://gitter.im/fossasia/hackathon (requires login with Github).
  4. Find team members and form a team with at least 2 members and maximum 4 contributors. You are also welcome to sign up and then wait until the Presentation of Ideas on Saturday before deciding to join a team, however we’d encourage you to form/join a team in advance if you already have an idea that you’d like to work on.
  5. Join the event at the Officience Vietnam on Saturday, Oct 13 at the opening at 8.30am until 9.00pm and on Sunday, Oct 14 from 8.00am until 5.00pm.

Visit the website at unesco.sciencehack.asia and stay connected, join the event on Facebook and follow FOSSASIA on Twitter.

Prizes

All participants will receive a gift bag (Tshirt, sticker, wristband and lanyard) and a certificate from UNESCO for participating in the hacking.

Each winner of the three top teams will be awarded special gift package including:

  • A Pocket Science Lab – hardware device by FOSSASIA
  • Special Developer Helmet by FOSSASIA
  • Winner Medal
  • Team Building Buffet Dinner Voucher
  • Team Hack-Away Mekong Delta Tour (floating Market, hackerspace, hotel)
  • Tiki Techie Gift Voucher
  • 6-month coworking space membership

Links

UNESCO Hackathon: https://unesco.sciencehack.asia

Tickets: https://eventyay.com/e/dbd7567d

Project Signup: https://unesco-hackathon.devpost.com

Communication Channel: https://gitter.im/fossasia/hackathon

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1713085622073681

FOSSASIA: https://twitter.com/fossasia

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Updates on FOSSASIA Activities – GSoC, Science Hack and Meshcon

FOSSASIA Participation in Google Summer of Code

An exciting summer is behind us, where we had lots of students coding on summer of code projects. Check out some of the outcome on our project repositories. For example the Open Event project, our twitter harvester and search engine loklak.net [repo] or the activities at our FashionTec knitapps project with lots of interesting blog articles.

FOSSASIA Science Hack

What else happened? FOSSASIA’s Hong Phuc is working on organizing Science Hack events across Asia in cooperation with Science Hack Day. She is now an official Ambassador. Congratulations! You can meet her in the US at the San Francisco Science Hack Day on October 24-25, 2015 at GitHub HQ.

FOSSASIA Participants Present at Meshcon @Maker Faire Berlin + Free Tickets

FOSSASIA participants are present at Meshcon@Maker Faire Berlin on Saturday, October 3rd. Meshcon brings together Mozilla’s Firefox Open Web makers, IoT experts, industry representatives, fashion designers, local producers, knitters, textile manipulators, software developers and DIY hardware makers. We will have a stand in the club area. So if you are there, please come over and talk to us.

And, if you are in Berlin and still need a ticket, we might be able to help you out. FOSSASIA is an official partner and we got free tickets. Please go to http://meshcon.net, choose your ticket and enter the code FLDUXH on the next page.

The event starts at 10am (until 6pm) on Sat. 3rd Oct. 2015 at Postbahnhof Club at Berlin Ostbahnhof. On top of topics around Fashion and technology, we are coding, doing usability tests and hack for refugees. The schedule of talks is available here: http://meshcon.net/schedule.pdf

130 projects will showcase their work at the Maker Faire. Workshops include FOSSASIA’s machine knitting project, 3D printing, and Arduino tinkering:

* http://www.meetup.com/FashionTec-Meetup-Berlin/

* http://www.meetup.com/OpenXLab/

* http://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-berlin/events/225532149/

Additional Info: http://meshcon.net | http://makerfaire.berlin

Location: Postbahnhof, Strasse der Pariser Kommune 8, 10243 Berlin

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Google Code-In Experience with FOSSASIA

For the last few weeks I got the opportunity to be involved in the Google Code-In 2014 program as a mentor for FOSSASIA (Thanks Andun Sameera!). It was challenging than I thought specially while doing a full time job. But was a great experience and I learned things myself with the students.

Google Code-In FOSSASIA 2014/15

FOSSASIA’s co-admin Mario Behling initiated an interesting project at the start of the program to give students an opportunity to experience open source development culture. The project was to create a small website to hold FOSSASIA’s students’ and mentors’ details. It came out to be a great success with a cute little website being created and more importantly a nice little community of students created around it.

Usually there is a barrier you need to get past as a novice contributor, to get your first commit merged in to an open source project. The administrators would want you to follow annoying coding conventions, to “combine your 5 commits, solving a simple small bug into one big commit” or to “rebase your pull request on top of master”. Until you continue contributing for some time and realize the importance of those, and start to appreciate them, they are just some annoyance that you have to deal with, on the way to get your work integrated.

We for this project initially made this barrier very very less challenging. We would merge pull requests if they do the job. This so that young student contributors don’t feel discouraged and only until they get themselves started. But having being well mentored at Google Summer of Code 2013 I wanted some niceties in our git commits. So I made learning them into a task.

Google Code-In Mentor Aruna Herath at work with FOSSASIAGoogle Code-In Mentor Aruna Herath at work

The task was to learn how to make your local commits look nice before you push them to the repo. To make it more organized and can be evaluated, and hopefully fun, I built up a small set of commits with a interesting bit of a commit history; a story. I added the set of commits to a Github repo that includes wrongly commited commit message and two commits that could look better sqashed into a bigger commit. Students are asked to clone the repo and then using git interactive rebase, make the commit history look better. The story of the commits and a set of instructions are given. Then they have to blog about there experience. They came up with some great write ups! Some focused on the technical aspects and were of a tutorial point of view. Some were explaining the personal experience writers themselves got and were on a lighter, less technical, language. However all were great!

I think I got few students to learn something that will be valuable in their future careers and also one student to start blogging! When I saw a set of commits that could be better organized in a pull request for any of FOSSASIA’s repositories, from a student who completed this task, I asked them to make them better. Thanks to above task, they knew the terminology, and communication was easier. When I say squash these commits and reword the commit message to something like this, they knew what I was saying, and how to do that, and were happy to oblige.

We gradually made it harder and more challenging, bringing the barrier to the usual level, for students who hang around to complete more tasks. This hopefully resulted in not only the finish product, but also the path towards it, to be in great shape. Students managed to complete many more very valuable work for FOSSASIA. It was fun working with them and I wish them an exciting and a fruitful future!

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