Strengthening Our Community Through Building Together
Part I: The Code & Supply Prize (or: “How Giving Away $1k Will Somehow Get People Closer”)
Code & Supply’s primary mission is building software community. We’ve got meetups, slack, conferences, and special events that bring people together. What we’ve built on that infrastructure is worth being proud of after having grown our memberships into the thousands. While the numbers are great, we need to take steps to strengthen the community that is behind them. For a few years now, we’ve focused on breadth more than depth and it’s created a disjointed community with members that feel no commitment to their affiliation with the group. In 2018, we’re changing that.
The main way we will build depth this year is by encouraging our community members to work together. Every community organizer wants to see their community changing the world around them and in software it’s so easy to have your efforts reach far and wide. If we can encourage our community members to work on open source projects together, we expect it will create camaraderie, a shared sense of ownership and accomplishment, and an overall stronger community.
The rest of this post will focus on the first part of our plan, the C&S Prize, but we plan to do the following to encourage that type of work:
- The Code & Supply Prize
- Giving free co-working desks to open source projects
- Creating an open source cohort
- De-emphasizing lectures in favor of collaborative sessions
- Hosting community owned projects in a central location, both physical and digital
- Adding streamers to our channel that will work on projects live
- Promoting our #side-projects Slack channel
The other strategies will be detailed in their own posts. Pay attention to our feed for those and keep reading below to learn more about the prize.
The Prize
The first step in the initiative to encourage project work is the Code & Supply Prize. We’re giving a $1000 prize to a project from our community with no strings attached. The winning project will be chosen based on creativity and skilled execution with special consideration given to the the prize’s potential impact on the project’s success or its creators. We hope to be the spark that ignites a project that otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity but we’re also fine if this ends up being a reward for building something awesome. Since the primary reason behind the award is motivating our community, we’re not looking for market disruptors or fully formed businesses. We’re looking for things that are genuinely cool or impactful on the world around us. Anything from your selfie printing machine to your art project visualizing the number of trees within a mile to your new programming language built especially for autonomous vehicles.
The first award will be made at the Build412 Technology Showcase on August 2nd. Submit your project for consideration at https://www.build412.org/pitch. The deadline is coming up fast with submissions only being accepted until July 31st. We’re doing such a short submission phase so we can present the award winners at the first ever Build412 Technology Showcase. Our partners over at Build412 have put together a great event for us to see some of the best submissions while enjoying a nice evening with people in the technology field over food and drinks. If you’d like to attend and see the showcase, register at https://build412.eventbrite.com/.
After the first award, we hope that we can continue the C&S prize to be a quarterly award depending on the funding availability. The first one will build publicity around the idea and afterwards we’ll be able to re-tool the award to emphasize projects built by community members that have come together because of Code & Supply.
