Last weekend we did our Tulsa Hackathon - the summary post has links to sites and code we made and a local media live stream where I talk too much like an idiot.
It was a great experience. Mozilla sponsored our after-party (thanks Stormy!) where I emphasized Mozilla's mission to open and improve the web for everyone - from 450 million Firefox users all over the world to 40 developers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Here's a quick summary of the projects that more-or-less finished (more details at the website):
- http://cfbeo.qrimp.com - a public website to help our local food bank register and organize volunteers
- http://trif.tulsawebdevs.org - a site and platform aggregating Tulsa traffic data
- http://www.fablabtulsa.com/the-lab/equipment - added equipment calendars and requests to the site
At Mozilla we have lots of remote employees who live in towns outside of the "hugeness bubbles" like Silicon Valley. I want to encourage any and all remote employees to get involved with their local technology and developer communities. To promote the Hackathon, I went on a whirlwind tour of our local groups - I spoke about Solr @ Tulsa Java, mobile web development @ Mobile Tulsa, attended a Tulsa .Net developers meeting, arranged an HTML5 track at Tulsa Tech Fest (where Dave gave us the big auditorium stage!), and attended our community leadership town hall. It was tiring, humbling, and inspiring. I'm still processing it all.
Programs like Mozilla Reps help amazing and effective volunteers to promote the Mozilla mission in local communities. In fact, out of all this activity, one of our Tulsa Web Dev's is applying to the program. But that shouldn't offset employees evangelizing for a free, open, and better web right in our own back yards!
