Category: Article

Or at least lets get our shoelaces tied!!

Help us alleviate digital poverty at Cotham School

We got behind the Cotham school campaign this week as they set up a crowd funder to get some Tech equipment for their pupils who had no digital access. The great thing is that they hit their initial goal – the second is that they’ve just released a statement saying that they will use any extra money they get to also support the other schools.

We are so moved by the generosity of our donors so far. Thank you so much. If we get enough to ensure that each of our 1550 students does have their own device to work from, we’ll use the rest of the donated money to help other Bristol schools to alleviate #digitalpoverty as we know that this issue is bigger than just our school.

We love collaborations so a big thanks to all our members for helping out and a big thumbs up to Cotham school for their collaborative message. If anyone wants to chip in then the fundraiser continues to run and you can find it here.

Events

There’s a list of this week’s events and conferences on our usual pages. Also, keep an eye on our jobs board as there are some seriously great purpose-driven companies looking to improve their inclusivity by reaching out to our members & candidates.

Manic Mondays

We’re back with our Manic Monday on the 11th of January – this is an online drop-in session. Alternatively, you are welcome to pop into our workshop Wednesday sessions for an informal chat while the presentations are running (details below)

Workshop Wednesdays

We’re back on the 13th, although currently we are rolling back in slowly (this is the tying our shoelace bit) and the main one this week is WebDev101 who are going to be building a great new website to support kids with tech. Its a great project and whilst aimed at beginners wanting to build up a portfolio it welcomes anyone wanting to come and support through mentoring or to help with content. This week Rob will be introducing the project which is called Bristol Tech Fair

For the rest of the workshops – we will be chatting PyLabs which will continue with James but in a slightly different format.

The first workshop will be an introduction to how we will start with the Scrum ceremonies. We’ll start to prepare and refine our first user stories and establish a cadence for the group. If you’d like to know a little more about writing code as part of a team, what Agile code development means or have something you’d like to contribute, please join us. There’s no expectation of commitment beyond the workshop.

The central session is also available to discuss future workshops and support, feel free to pop along just to catch up and discuss these with us.

Should anyone want to cut their teeth doing a talk please let us know on info@wthub.org. You can sign up for the next one at Workshop Wednesdays or CodeHub @ Workshop Wednesdays

It’s not been an easy year and we suspect that this year won’t be plain sailing either, but at least there are some solutions on the horizon and in the history of pandemics none have actually lasted more than a year or two, well other than Aids, Cholera and the Black Death apparently. So let’s start this year on a positive Vibe and watch the dancing robots which are both trending and a nice bit of showing off from Boston Dynamics (now Hyundai we guess since they were recently bought).

Manic Mondays

We’re back with our Manic Monday on the 4th of January – this is an online drop-in session. Alternatively, you are welcome to pop into our workshop Wednesday sessions for an informal chat while the presentations are running (details below)

Workshop Wednesdays

These are back from the 13th – we will put out separate blogposts on what’s coming up as there’s some interesting projects coming to the workshops. Should anyone want to cut their teeth doing a talk please let us know on info@wthub.org. You can sign up for the next one at Workshop Wednesdays or CodeHub @ Workshop Wednesdays but if you want to speak to some humans before that then pop along to Hack Night @CodeHub and go say hi to the codehub bunch.

Events

As we’ve not been out and about over the holidays and its been relatively quiet the events page has been merged for the 2 weeks so check out any happenings on our Events page. One that caught our eye was Thursdays Tech Tutors: How do I build a community-owned conservation tech project?:

WILDLABS Tech Tutors launched in 2020 with the goal of bringing #tech4wildlife experts directly to you. Brought to you with the support of Microsoft AI for Earth, this series is all about providing you with the bite-sized, easy-to-understand building blocks you’ll need to broaden your conservation technology horizons, enhance your research, or launch a new collaborative project. Our new season will take you even deeper into those tricky “how do I do that?” questions of conservation tech, we hope you’ll discover new perspectives and ideas to bring to your own #tech4wildlife work.

Taking place every Thursday, each Tech Tutor will present a 30 minute tutorial guiding you through an aspect of conservation tech, followed by a 30 minute live Q&A session with the audience.