Creating a forum for Sri Lankan Hacktivism

[Adnan Issadeen]

During the October meetup of Refresh Colombo I gave a presentation where I demoed my product Project MADA and afterwards invited anyone from the audience to come take the challenge of presenting their product the next month. At that time no one took up the challenge but it was good to see that people were still around to present a product at the November meetup which I sadly had to miss. Neverthelss, it seems like a good time to wake up the sl tech community and create a community of slhacktivists where programmers get to know each other and we foster an environment which promotes things getting done.

 

To get that started I took feedback from a lot of people and am now trying to get two things going. The SL Hackathon and the SL Hacktivists movement. You can read more about them over at my blog

 

http://techstopmuse.blogspot.com/2011/11/who-wants-to-hack.html

 

http://techstopmuse.blogspot.com/2011/11/sl-hacktivist-movement.html

 

We are now on IRC. If you want to know how to join the channel slhacktivists on irc.foonetic.net I've written a guide for it here.

 

http://techstopmuse.blogspot.com/2011/11/sl-hacktivists-your-guide-to-joining.html

 

It's time to convert the postive energy and lessons learnt from Refresh Colombo into a tangible output. Let the hacktivism begin.

 

ps- A quick description of the two channels.

 

#SLHacktivists – Will be the channel you want to go to if you want to hang out with the rest of the programmers in SL. Discuss your random programming problems. Share stuff you find interesting and just chill and get to know the community there. There might occasionally be interesting topics based on what you guys want. So enjoy your time there. (Right now at the time of writing this it may be a little cricket like silent but don’t worry. People will come soon hopefully). Join this channel first and even idle there it's ok. We just need to build up the community.

 

#SLHackathon – Will be the default channel we land up in for the hackathon days. Also on non hackathon days if you want to discuss your hackathon projects going to that channel would be a good idea but I’m not sure how the non hackathon days would pan out. Most important and distinguishing factor of this channel, going off topic will not be tolerated here all that much. I came to realise some time ago that conversation can be the bane of all productivity in situations like this. So small talk chit chat will not be allowed. If you want to have a friendly chat and get to know your fellow hacktivists, that's what #slhacktivists is for.