On Friday the 24th of August, I had a chance to visit Copenhagen with HYF. I had asked Wouter and Noer whether I was required to prepare any speech or something. They said, "Naah, just come and participate". So I came and participated. Friday dinner along the docks by the harbour of Copenhagen was easy to participate in. Mostly involved eating and (re)connecting to altruistic people from all over Europe. Saturday was the busiest day of all three. Federico made an amazing brakfast for everyone : Avocado, mushrooms, tomatoes and toasted breads. The meeting place was a four storeyed building that caters for start-ups and has a lot of open working space. We were greeted by Christopher, Marie and Benjamin who run the Copenhagen chapter of HYF. Christopher who studied with our dear Gijs shares similar values and entrepreneurial skills. Benjamin has experience in developing a dating apps for Muslims and a start-up related to solar panels. Marie has about 10 years of volunteering experience in an asylum center. With people of such interesting backgrounds, there was a lot to hear and learn from them.
Every chapter of HYF was planning to make a 10 minute presentation about their chapters. Each 10 minute presentation lasted at least 30 minutes plus 20-25 minutes of Q/A, many times with a lively exchange of ideas.
Chris who ran Social Hackers Academy in Athens shared his experience of combining local (Greek) people and the refugees in the same class and how it helped in the integration.
Maite from Brussels HYF who at that moment had been running the HYF affairs for a few months single handedly, presented the Belgian chapter of refugees.
We realized that HYF cannot be the same in every city but our motto remained essentially the same : "Helping people so that they can help themselves".
After about three hours of presentations, we had a quick lunch break. Chris and co. had arranged a buffet including vegan options which naturally delighted me.
We skipped the museum visit and instead delved into discussion topics.
Student Experience was the first one that was put on the table.
It mainly revolved around homework submission and repository management, however
there were some nice points made:
- asking students to make private repositories to avoid plagiarism.
- having only repository for homework with folder structure according to modules.
- having monitors/leaders in the class to lead study groups, homework submission tracking.
The boat trip was planned for the evening which was rather ideal for that hot sunny day.
The boat trip was like a canal-cruise in Amsterdam (with a lot of other people)
but we found a cozy corner for our meeting !
We extended our discussions on the boat with various topics like teacher experience
and challenges in getting jobs. Rasmus (a mentor at Copenhagen) also joined for the boat
trip with whom I had interesting discussion about his PhD and his time in Japan.
We had a little photo-shoot near a park before our dinner appointment. For dinner, we went to an Indian restaurant giving enough boost to my taste buds.
We concluded the evening with drinks in a bar where one of the students worked. More mentors and students joined us for drinks and it made the evening more lively.
Sunday began with a food festival! For breakfast, we went to the classroom of
Copenhagen HYF and on the very table we had lunch yesterday, we all sat down to
have yet another feast. Lot of students and mentors had prepared delicacies from all
over the world. A way to (hu)man's heart is certainly through his stomach.
Before noon, everyone was well fed and well prepared for sleeping learning.
They had three classes running: Databases, Git and React. I chose to attend the Git class for the first half. It was fun assisting in the class and interacting with students. Funnily enough, the problems faced by students were very similar to the ones faced by students in Amsterdam. It came to my mind how easy it is to share the knowledge for problem solving and troubleshooting across the HYF chapters. I also spent some time in the Databases class and was impressed with their use of MySQL Workbench software.
At the end of the day, we had a picnic on grass somewhere in the city. We could observe the satisfaction of the successful weekend on everyone's face. Ready to hack our future!
Thanks, @unmeshvrije. Perhaps good to mention a few practical follow-ups:
Amsterdam
Selection criteria
We will further explore opening up HYF AMS to other target groups. Our discussion on Saturday and meeting the students on Sunday really helped in that regard. However, we also noticed selecting non-refugees is a slippery-slope. We do want to make sure our future applicants really need our help. If not, HYF has no longer added value. We are currently hosting three open days to invite anyone interested in HYF. The aim is to gain more insight into the composition of these new target groups. We are also developing a small list of indicators of ‘vulnerability’. We love the idea of Denmark to share the composition of the new class with our volunteers (i.e. details on nationality, gender, refugees - non-refugees).
Impact Report
We want to draft a short impact report (4-pages max) that gives insight into our impact in AMS. Tax revenues, Reduction in costs for the welfare state, employment etc. . This will help us when approaching investors. Would be great to work with CPH on this.
Copenhagen
Even more rigid structures
Significant organisational changes over the last year with Benjamin (ED) joining and long-term funding secured. However, the discussions during the weekend also made it a bit more evident that we are creating too much extra work for ourselves by trying to be flexible for the students (we do have a very mixed group after all). So we will put a lot of work into creating tighter regiments for ourselves ("Wednesday Madness!!") and stricter rules along which students can still move with reasonable freedom. (tighter homework control will relieve "downriver" issues.)
Placements - "Channel your inner Federico"
The biggest challenge for us will be to earning money through placement fees (40% of the budget in Amsterdam). 100% of the budget is now donor funding, but we would like to earn additional revenues through these placements fee. Chatting with everyone, but especially @fede was very motivating for nailing the language and approach to help companies paying fees Would be cool to schedule a screen-share meeting some day and go over more practicalities as well.
Belgium
Be more strict in terms of processes and structures
Small changes will lead to a better quality of the education, see also comments CPH.
Partnerships
Now that an Education Director is on board, Belgium will finally get the time to focus on approaching companies and design different ways to get them involved also for education purposes. They loved the idea of Q&As as used in Amsterdam.