recap #4

Hey everyone,

it's 2013 - the year of the AfricaHackTrip! I'm sure you guys can't await the day the trip starts – but there is still some work ahead of us.

But first, let's recap.

• our objective is to explore the status quo of African tech communities, to connect, and to share our experiences with a video documentation.
• we will visit Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali and Dar es Salaam and stay for one week at each location.
• the trip will happen in September / October this year, it will start with the DEMO Africa conference in Nairobi
• we are a team of 8+ developers, designers, project managers and bloggers.
• we have www.africahacktrip.org (Thanks Pete & Michael), a mailing list and @AfricaHackTrip on Github and Twitter
• we have a highrise account for internal communications
• we have a nice logo and a simple press kit (thanks Jan)
• we have a trailer for our project (thanks Alex!!!)
• we know everything we need to know regarding vaccination and visas (thanks Frank & Jan)
• We have location hosts for each location and an idea of what we want / want not to do (thanks Anya, Martin, Frank)
• We co-organized a rhok event in Berlin (thanks Michael)
• We started with the treatment for our video documentation (thanks Alex)

We are on a good track. In the past three months we set the framework and the scope for the project and discussed our expectations. The first three months have been mostly about ourselves, and now it's time to think more about what we want from others and what others can expect from us. It's time to reach out and make it happen. Lots of calls will have to be made, so let me summarize the experience we had so far.

The feedback is throughout positive, everyone likes our idea. But we also learned that we are lacking concrete answers to many basic questions like “what do you expect from us?” and “what can we expect from you?”. Let's discuss these in our upcoming meeting. I'll also setup an FAQ to gather questions others have about us and to collaborate on the answers.

Another problem we run into several times is our imprecise date frame. My suggestion: we guess. We’ll know the date soon enough to change appointments if needed, but it helps while discussing with local contacts and potential sponsors.

The next step is to organize our stays in the cities we visit. In our last meeting we agreed to not overdo the agenda, to leave place for serendipity. On the other side, for outsiders, it might be misleading. I'd suggest to do both, kind of:

we could make several interesting appointments upfront, to make sure that our video documentation has enough interesting aspects. We will also communicate this as our official agenda. On the other side, none of these appointments will be mandatory. So besides a one day event per location, everybody besides the video documentation team can do whatever she/he thinks is best for the project.

One more thought regarding our events we plan to hold on each location. I thought about making hackathons, but after thinking more about it, I'd rather go with some kind of "mini conferences", with talks and workshops. Without the pressure that to finish something by the end of the day. Instead with a place where people can have drinks and discussions at any time, a place for space for serendipity.

These are just suggestions from my side based on the meetings and discussions we had in our journey so far. I'd like to take them as our discussion basis for our upcoming meeting. Here's the doodle link to find the best date / time for it:

DOODLE LINK HERE

Thanks all!