Miami’s First DiscoTech & Demoing at Miami Mini Maker Faire
February marks the big kick-off of our 2016 Code for Miami events, and last week was an especially busy one for Code for Miami brigadeers.
On Monday, we skipped our usual meetup at The LAB to co-host Miami’s first DiscoTech at EcoTech Visions as part of Black Tech Week. A DiscoTech — short for Discovering Technology Fair — is like a tech science fair for members of the community at all technological skill levels. Ours included a DJ and Code for Miami’s signature cheap pizza buffet. 😂
About 10 Code for Miami members and others in Miami’s tech community brought their favorite tools and demoed a variety of projects for the community, including our trolley tracker and transit map, FIU’s crowd-sourced sea level rise app, Citygram, Miami-Dade’s Open Data Portal and various mapping tools with our friends at MapTime Miami. Non-civic projects included a video game emulator that Mario Cruz built on RaspberryPi and a social media show-and-tell with Miami’s own Pineapple Citizen.
With pizza and tunes fueling the fun, Miamians young and old got a new sense of what is happening on our tech scene, saw what’s possible with open-source and low-cost software and hardware, and tried out some open apps for Miami.
“We don’t see many tech events this diverse in Miami,” said Dr. Pandwe Gibson, founder of EcoTech Visions, a green business incubator and non-profit that generously opened their space for the event. “I am so happy to see people of all ages and backgrounds from our community having fun, experiencing tech and connecting like this.”
On Saturday, Code for Miami manned a booth at Miami Mini Maker Faire, the largest gathering of tinkers, hackers and makers in our city. We showcased our trolley tracker there too, and met plenty of new Miamians with great ideas for projects and future efforts.
Code for Miami co-founder Rebekah Monson gave a talk about how everyone can contribute to hacking our city. You can check out the slides, and we’ll add a video of the talk when it becomes available.
Two major events in one week was a tall order, but we’re just getting started serving our community. On March 4–6, we’re teaming up with RefreshMiami for Hack-For-Good (and our annual CodeAcross hackathon). We’ll pair local nonprofits with the top tech talent in Miami to come up with solutions to their biggest challenges. Hope to see you there!
