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December Town Hall
Posted by David Kane on 28 November 2013
Our next Town Hall meeting is scheduled for Monday 2nd December at 7pm in the Event Space* at Farset.
We’ll be discussing a variety of issues, as well as giving an update on the work occurring in the space. If you have any questions or concerns, email us at admin@farsetlabs.org.uk and we’ll add them to the agenda to be brought up. Afterwards, the minutes will be made available here. EDIT: Link to minutes is here.
*We’ll move to the Lounge/Co-working Space if the renovations are affecting the Event Space.
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Hack for your community sponsored by Liberty IT
Posted by David Kane on 27 November 2013
We are pleased to announce that Farset Labs will be hosting a hackathon on the weekend of the 7th and 8th of December*. The event, sponsored by Liberty IT, will be held in the newly renovated Event Space in Farset.
The hackathon brings together like-minded, creative thinkers with their most innovative ideas. You’ll be given the weekend to work on an idea you’d like to kick-start, taking advantage of a community’s knowledge sharing, as well as equipment and resources provided by Farset. And of course, there will be plenty of food and caffeine in supply to keep your energy levels up throughout the weekend!
To get a feel for how we run hackathons, have a look at some of our previous ones! Global Game Jam was extra special, but our usual Flacknites are a good demo of the ‘hands off’ approach we take.
This year the hackathon has the feel-good theme of “Making a Difference in the Community”, so chosen ideas should ultimately be for a good cause and benefit the local community in some way. That coupled with the chance to win a prize fund... ...
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Raspberry Jam Round-up
Posted by benbland on 21 November 2013
For any visionary, dreamer or hapless idiot trying to drive societal change, there can be few things more vindicating than the sight of school-age kids teaching adults how to do things. I wandered into our Raspberry Jam event on Saturday and felt the status bar on my Hope Drive stretch out a little, maybe from orange into green. Raspberry Jams are open to anyone and this time we had people from zero years-old (yes, actually) up to, well, I wouldn’t like to say but put it this way: they’d remember Belfast before The Troubles.
This time the regular Farset crowd got a big boost by having the running of the event taken off our hands by the irrepressible AndrewMulholland, who finds time amidst schoolwork to make and teach technology (we hear his latest project with his school robotics club is a cardboard quadcopter; turns out the sky isn’t the limit!). Andrew is one of a line of Dalriada acolytes to find their way to Farset somehow, setting a high bar for the involvement of NI’s schools in the maker revolution.
Going round the room, seated in front of monitors and amongst a snakes’ nest... ...
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Gathering of Sleighbells – Christmas Edition
Posted by Andrew Bolster on 21 November 2013
Our long running, Ignite / Petcha Kutcha -minus-the-presentations-plus-a-giant-blackboard-and-foam-projectiles speaker series is back, with a slightly festive feel! Normal rules apply; Speakers have 7 minutes to talk about something they’re passionate about, with audience heckling encouraged, and the opportunity for a few more minutes of Q&A after at the compères discretion. This time around, the wonderful Claire Wilgarwill be compère-ing (we expect Christmas Hats!) and for a change we have a rough idea of whose talking!
- Jiann Hughes will be talking about her work in the intersection between Art, Culture, and Technology
- Colin Kelsey/Matt Hazely will be explaining some of the beer brewing techniques they are experimenting with in the labs
- Will Burr from Billy Goat Entertainment will be demoing some of his currently-Kickstarting game, Her Majesty’s Spiffing
- Dr David Laverty, for Queen’s University Belfast’s Energy, Power and Intelligent Systems (EPIC) group, who are working onconverting a classic DeLorean to an Electric drive train
- Sebastian Heinz from SARC will hopefully be demoing his wildly successful Patchblocks project that has already obliterated its £10k funding goal
- We’ll also hopefully have a visit from some developers from Aepona, a locally based API-as-a-service company recently... ...
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Results from CoderDojo Attendee Survey
Posted by Andrew Bolster on 10 November 2013
A few weeks ago we sent out survey requests to anyone who’d attended (and registered) to our CoderDojo programme since day one.
This was so we could get a better handle on what we were doing well, and maybe not so well, and was also intended to answer one simple question; which day is better to run it. I’ll not be making any grand analysis yet as I believe the results tell their own story.
If you’d like to add your thoughts, the poll is still open, but we’ll be feeding these findings back into our plan going forward and will let you know any changes ASAP.
And don’t forget, the next dojo is next Friday
What day of the week works best for you and your family to attend the Dojo in the evening
We intentionally restricted the options in this question to Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday as Wednesday is already reserved for free for any usergroup that wants to hold an event, and Saturdays are too high value for hackathons and other events to block book.
How... ...