Crowdsourcing the next open Summer of code speakers
28 Apr 2015 · Pieter-Jan Pauwels
Last saturday we organised ‘SWACKday’, a hackday attended by our #oSoc14 students and a few #oSoc15 candidates (hell yeah, new blood). The focus of the hackday was on building the new version of the Apps for X website as initiated by team SWAG during the Apps for Ghent hackathon. Which ended up in mostly setting up Vagrant boxes.
Besides coding for team SWAG, we also had motivated students gathering input and thus co-creating open Summer of code 2015. They did everything from (re)writing our Code of Conduct, creating an ‘open badges‘ achievement system for the students, brainstorming about which tools we should use (Taiga.io ftw!), what locations and partners would be awesome AND last but not least what speakers we should invite during the #oSoc15 lunchtalks.
Last year we had the honour of having Hans Verscheure, e-Government manager of the City of Kortrijk, Ruben Verborgh, semantic researcher at MultiMedia lab and Phil Archer of W3C coming over to talk and interact with our students. This year will be no exception if one or more of these wonderful proposed speakers wants to join us for a lunchtalk.
So we asked the students who their professional heroes and heroines were…
This is what they came up with:
| Name | Twitter or link | Subject |
|---|---|---|
| Tim Berners-Lee | @Timberners_lee | Linked Open Data |
| Lea Verou | @LeaVerou | CSS |
| Douglas Crockford | GitHub Crockford | Javascript |
| Paul Irish | @paul_irish | Javascript |
| Rachel Rayns | @rachelrayns | Raspberry Pi |
| Gabe Newell | Gabe Newell | Half Life 3 |
| Massimo Banzi | @mbanzi | Arduino |
| Zhong Xu | @zhxu | Posios Story |
| Harry Roberts | @csswizardry | Design |
| Wouter Smet | @woutersmet | Growth Hacking |
| Alexander De Croo | @alexanderdecroo | Innovation in Belgium |
| Jeremyle Van | @jeremylv | Sunrise story |
| Arne Bassez | @Arnebassez | Start up |
| Kristof Houben | @houbenkristof | Product Design |
| Roy Van Dijk | @r_oy | Design |
| Valentijn Destoop | @quidante | Design |
| Stephane Vanhalkman | Roninweb on Dribble | Design |
| Addy Osmani | @addyosmani | Javascript |
| Tim Van Lier | @vanlier | Digital Media |
| Thomas Joos | @thomasjoos | Innovation |
| Michiel Akkermans | Michel Akkermans | Start-Up BE |
| Robin Wauters | @robinwauters | Tech in EU |
Are you one of the speakers mentioned above and are you enthused to speak to our students during open Summer of code? We have no big budgets, but powerhouse students, fine Belgian beers and innovation flowing through our systems. We will be located somewhere in or near a Belgian city. We open up the talks to people located at our host and stream the whole thing via Google Hangout on Air for those who can’t make it. Because you know, we want to open up our knowledge.
