Florida Hackers — Rolling The Ball Even Further
A year to remember, a year to look forward to.
It’s been a year since we published Floatie. Floatie was made to bring student leaders together for a weekend of learning, networking and decompression. We conceived, planned and executed and left a notable impact on people who went. It also helped make a hat that was more than just a hat. None of the organizers knew at the start that they were going to go from talk at HackCon to talking at their own conference. When we connected our communities across the state we gave many students the of home and made the nights they spent providing for their communities far less lonely.
Before Floatie- Florida Hackers coordinated travel and facilitated connections between a growing number of student hackers across Florida. Still does! The best part- the mission is still not complete. Florida’s hackathon attendance increased, SwampHacks 2017 could barely accommodate all of it’s attendees without violating fire code and PolyHacks saw other schools swarm into lakeland, eager to attend. Students still couldn’t get enough, they traveled to different universities representing themselves, their schools and their state. Just in 2016/2017 alone, we had 7 hackathons with total a estimated attendance of 1,500 students. Many of those attendees had attended two or more hackathons. Part of the value building a regional community is seeing the same faces and making friends all across hackathons.
As we planned these events, students across Florida filled busses and carpools. — Schools outside of Florida were able to communicate with student leaders to become ambassadors of their events and help bring more attendee’s to their events.
Student hackathons approach their 5th year in the mainstream. With every new school year, we have new students. It is important that a new generation of students are able to experience these wonderful events because we believe that students should have as many chances as possible to turn theory into practice. The tech world is expansive with hundreds of specialties, hackathons have given students the chance to find their place in it. Providing the most welcoming on-ramp into the tech world allows us to help students feel included, where one can be comfortable reach out for help to anyone within your school and Florida.
For a community like this to work, it needs to scale.
When Florida Hackers started from Facebook Chats to Google Hangouts to a conference, there was a core philosophy behind accomplishing our goals. “Help grow the hacker culture in Florida, connect creators across the state, promote community building, and leave our sunshine state a little brighter than before.” Our work is far from done.
We prided ourselves on testing and iterating on ideas until we felt happy enough with our work to release it to the community. It allowed us to make a pretty damn good new website and some nice swag.
No one asked for permission to create and ship great ideas. Mostly because there was no one to answer to. We still believe there is no one above you, hacker culture — whether nurtured, discovered or ingrained, at its very nature asks for forgiveness after the button to ship has been launched.
However, in our haste to make great things. We didn’t have time to finally realize our goals to to put a efficient way to onboard people who wanted to get involved and no way to effectively communicate those opportunities to new students. One of the shortcomings of our prior system is that our team became bottlenecked with the amount of work and real life responsibilities that lay outside of our regular calls until they became not so regular.
This year, all the organizers realized that just like their haphazard start to community building, it would be great to have more people join the party. After all, a rising tide lifts all boats.
So we invite you to bring your passions to the Florida Hacker’s team, with our website now open sourced. We are now about to open-source another project.
Florida Hackers Initiatives
A better open door policy.
We have a lot of great ideas, but we figure yours are even better. The issue is when people wanted to do something new, we had the false idea that they required management/oversight from a designated group to some level. As mentioned in this post about open-sourcing our Platform… Open Source solved many of the tangential problems stemming from the main problem listed in the previous article.
As mentioned before- Florida Hackers handles travel between schools, prints out swag, serves as a home base for student members within tech communities to talk and hosts events for different student populations. But all those actions didn’t come out of a document commanding people to do just that. It came out of a desire to serve, solve interesting problems and experiment. It is not as known that FH also did Student Hacker interviews, regular Google Hangout talks, and bar crawls.
We want all students to feel equitable in this community.
A repository where students within the community can contribute ideas, calls for organizers, and events.
Hackers can be added to the organization to undertake any project they wish to propose.
On this repository will be an example initiative that was born at the very core of our founding, travel. One process that could be is getting the contact information for various Bus/Travel Captains across the schools to different events. Having a source of truth for that information will make organizers lives easier.
So whatever you request, be it organizing the next Floatie or wanting to build a wiki, or a alumni network. We will provide logos, mentorship, alumni, advice and a great community to call home while doing so.
This helps us solve a multitude of problems.
- Giving Florida Hackers to the community.
- Allowing older community members to empower a new generation of hackers.
- Opening up opportunities to get involved in open-source and community building in tech.
- Helping Florida Hackers empower the schools that need outreach.
Tech is a huge field, it is about time our opportunities go outside the usual role of engineering and help enrich the folks that support and write software. (All the while helping you go through school.) We have many desires to where Florida Hackers can go, but we realise they mean nothing without input from the community and the people that don’t know they are part of it yet. We feel it will be a great platform for aspiring PMs, designers and other neglected folks in our discipline to get involved and find their home. After all, it is now more important that all viewpoints are taken into account in this discipline. Diversity is inviting someone to a marina. Inclusion is inviting them to sail.
https://github.com/floridahackers/fh-initiatives
We will love to have you involved.
Let us set sail. This year we have 5 events happening within the remainder of 2017 with many more yet to be announced. While having a bus to HackGT from Miami to Atlanta. We will always be missing something at these events, and that is you.
Happy Hacking!
A special thanks to Christian Pelaez-Espinosa, Matt O’Hagan, Ben Thornton, Jonathan, Takashi Wickes, Marisa Gomez, and Samantha Soto. For all their work on Florida Hackers so far. And a special shoutout to Bernard Marger and Diva Hurtado- for a conversation that would spark many more in this state. Thanks to all the new organizers that have jumped on board to keep this ship sailing.
