Community Call 18 September 2014

On Matera and what we can do there

Sorry for not making it to the call, guys, I had a pressing conf call to attend. Hopefully some good news will come through from what I am up to there :slight_smile:

I expect a much greater involvement of the local community in LOTE4 than we had in LOTE3. @NicoBis's role is not just to let people know about it, but also to drive locals to propose and curate sessions. This thing about oil is a great idea, and I would definitely like to see it happen.

Two more sessions that can be contextualized locally and have already been proposed are:

Maybe we could ask local people to come in as discussants for Robert and Bjorn; we could even put them in contact with Robert and Bjorn well ahead of time, so that they can prepare the session together.

Two sessions I would like to see and can be led by locals:

  • How to get a thousand children to code together – a wrapup of the largest CoderDojo in the world, to take place in Matera. This is led by @piersoft and @Marc. We could even celebrate the strongest contributor to that community, a programmer that goes by T-Rexus and is only 10 years old. He is good enough that they have given him mentor training and let him teach other children! 
  • The art of travelling by walking. The perfect speaker here is Emanuele Sileo of Associazione Al Parco, who has great English. They are doing a very very cool initiative in which people from all over the region are going to walk to Matera from their villages to tell the adjudicating panel for European City of Culture 2019 that "rural Basilicata supports Matera, and that we care". In their case, the walk is about 120 kms, it will take five days and they will walk with "U Rumit", a sort of mythical tree-creature (think Treebeard in The Lord of The Rings) that is part of their local folklore – here is the map of the different itineraries, but more are still being added. 

Thoughts?