Mombasa Social Hackerthon
A two day hackerthon held at Camara Hub Mombasa
Day 1
The hackerthon commenced at around 9:45 am with a brief introduction of the project by Musa Alfan after which Mr. Philip McAllister, the CEO at Camara talked a little about Camara, what it does as well as its collaboration with Mombasa Tech Community.
Shortly thereafter, attendants briefly introduced themselves to build a sense of cohesiveness between attendees and to better relations for effective collaboration; everyone introduced themselves by name, the institutions they are affiliated with as well as a brief of their skillset.
Musa Alfan then spoke presented an overview of the project, the objectives of the Mombasa Social Network, Tools to be used and deliverables for the dayas well as for the hackerthon.
Thereafter, teams were formed on a basis of the overall skillset of the group i.e. each group had to have(if any):
- Someone confident and comfortable in their development skills
- Guys that had a bit of exposure with design or development (rookies)
- The ones that hadn’t had any sort of experience or exposure (newbies)
Two teams were formed - each team had a mentor (Swaleh Abubakar and Musa Alfan) to guide guys through the UI/UX phase of development. Teams were tasked with the responsibility of coming up with wireframes, color schemes and final mock-ups.
Final Mock-ups; at the end of this phase of development, each team had a team member explain their mockup in terms of interface and functionality (UX). Of the mockups presented, attendees had to choose the better but eventually decided to integrate the best features from both mockups to form the final. This wasn’t until some serious discussion and arguments were made about features that were best. We were blessed to have Swaleh Abubakarwith us who helped participants keep an open mind and see the big picture as well as making some pretty good arguments himself. Eventually the final Mockups were made and we concluded for the day.
Day 2
The second and final day of the hackerthon started off at 9.15 am though some attendees had made it as early as 8:30 am to have their own solo sessions in preparation for day 2.
Musa Alfan had a short recap session about the experiences of the previous day as well as the designs presented.
Said Fuad then took the guys through Elgg Engine and the theme to be used as well as making reference to the Mombasa Social project how it could be customized visually and as well as what features could be added (using plugins) to map it onto the previous days deliverables. As we had decided to host the project locally on machines, he also took guys through Wampp and Xampp for windows and Linux users (some attendees already had these as well as Lampp). The tools were installed with Said’s’ guidance and we began to have a look at the theme.
We had a solo session where guys had the opportunity to play around with Elgg with Said Fuad and Musa Alfan around for any assistance after which we had a combined session with guys pitching their ideas on the features to be added.
...time was not on our side so we decided to use github for further progress on the project. The repository project was created with some attendees being added.
We concluded with guys being urged to learn more about development and the various languages involved s further so that we (mainly HTML, CSS, JS and PHP) and committing themselves further so that we could all move at par.
Lunch and snacksI didn’t mention these but it was awesome; special thanks to the sponsors.
Due credit goes to Ahmed Maawy, the brain child of the idea, CAMARA for hosting us, Sponsors for their valuable support, Musa Alfan - Design Lead of the project, Said Fuad - developer lead, Murad Swaleh and Swaleh Abubakar, the UI/UX mentors, Twahir Hussein, Nabila Hassan and Alifiyah Ganijee for their generous contributions in planning and organizing the event and making sure everything fell right into place and ofcourse the awesome team that presented themselves during the hackerthon!It would not have been possible without you!
We shall soon be announcing the next meet up for Mombasa Social...don't miss it!
Check out Event Photos