For the very first time this year, I had the chance to be part of Code Week Europe. EU Code Week is an initiative that started back in 2013 and its mission is to bring people from different social and age groups together and share knowledge and experience through Computer Science in general.
During December 2017, Anisa, Redon, Andis and I traveled to Burrel in order to hold a workshop for the kids of three different primary schools there. All four of us come from a FLOSS community based in Tirana, Open Labs Hackerspace. Burrel is a remote and rural area, which means that the impact that our presence had there was huge. We stayed in the city for about three days.
The total number of students attending our workshop was about to 65, almost 20 kids per day. During all three days, we used to start with a general presentation of the Wikimedia projects. We explained to the kids the difference between each project and how to contribute to each of them. After the presentations, we started creating accounts.
Before we arrived there, we had already prepared a list of articles that needed improvement or articles to create during those days on Wikipedia. All articles were related to the city of Burrel and the natural monuments of the region around Burrel. Along with the articles, the kids learned how to add references and links and realized how important it is to have trusted sources for our articles. Also, we took some pictures of the city that were uploaded afterwards on Commons.
The second part of the workshop included a mapathon on the OpenStreetMap platform. Again, the kids were introduced to the OSM project and its community. They created their own accounts and started their first contributions on OSM.
Code Week was a different experience from others that I had been part of before. It made me realize that sharing your knowledge and experience with others who don’t have the same access to knowledge as you do can change some people’s lives…. Looking forward to more edit-a-thons like this one.
All pictures on this post are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.