Odo: mostly the same
Location: Hildesheim / Germany

I really enjoy places and projects who mix up different kinds of crowds by a common interest. It’s much more fun to have some political, artsy, whatever folks working on something together then just hanging out with tech folks. So when I read about a new project for digital culture and network policy (internet & tacos) in Hildesheim I was quite interested. When they asked for coaches for a HTML workshop on the mailing list of the local hackerspace I had a look at their program for the weekend and a plan emerged: Go there on Saturday to see some presentations and discussions and do coaching on Sunday. Hildesheim is actually a town of itself but being part of the Hannover metro area it’s merely a half hour drive from my place.

I’m working as a “web developer” for more than ten years by now but I never was skilled as a web designer and sticked to programming and using ready made widgets in the last years. So I actually learned quite some stuff about doing bare bones HTML & CSS while teaching it. Sounds weird but it was actually quite some fun and effective as well. Instead of preparing a lengthy presentation and some exercises the other coaches decided to just give a very short presentation of what HTML is and then split up into small groups and take it from there because we had no clue what kind of folks would show up.

My group turned out to be fast learning so their problems soon became to difficult to solve for me without doing research. So I switched from teaching them HTML & CSS to teaching them how to learn that stuff by their selves. Shortly after the switch they started dissecting their own works and other pages with firebug and were sifting through different tutorials to find explanations of the features they needed. It was a really nice day for me and judging by theirs works my group did learn quite some stuff.

I guess I will return there next weekend. Since they are only open for three weeks (up to the end of the month), returning there “sometime in the feature” is not exactly an option. And I’m looking forward to see some presentations about net art as well!