GDG COMMUNITY OUTREACH, MERU UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Posted By: Unknown On Wednesday 26 October 2016


One of the things that our community pioneers cared so much about was sharing the GDG Love with everyone — reaching out to anyone interested about Google technologies and bringing them together to share ideas, to collaborate, and to learn. Members of our community are always eager to offer support, experience, and mentorship to different communities.

On 8th October 2016, The Computer Society of Kimathi led by Billy Rotich, Intel Student Partners led by Chris Barsolai, Microsoft Student Partners led by Arthur Otieno, and Officials from Dedan Kimathi University Incubation Centre, all members of our GDG Community left for the Meru University of Technology with a mission.

The objectives for our outreach are listed as follows:
  1. Increase awareness of the GDG Community to the university developer community in Meru
  2. Brainstorm ways to engage both communities in advancing the local tech ecosystem and Foster collaboration.
  3. Identify synergy opportunities between The Meru Community and GDG Kimathi University
  4. Have fun!
During the event, we had a single session with 5 different speakers. We first had Kenneth Njihia from The DeHUB. He talked about how their space helps to incubate research innovations. He also  explained how vibrant communities such as GDG Kimathi University engage in weekly programs that involves business talks, technical meet-ups and creatives’ sessions.

He was followed by Ngesa Marvin who talk about Open Source Community and Google developer Groups. He explained how enthusiastic developers interested in learning more about new technologies can come together to learn, practice, collaborate and share experience about Google technologies.


He also explained how they hold meetings and organize events like Code Sprints, Hackathons and schools challenges. He clarified that the meetings are and will always be free and open to anyone. He encouraged them to form and join such communities.

He was immediately followed by Evelyn Kaberere who gave a talk on what Women Tech Makers is all about and how the program provides visibility, resources and community. She gave them various reasons why they needed to be programmers to encourage them indulge more into code. Various Women Tech Makers videos were shown about various women in the Tech industry.

Kithinji Muriungi then introduced microcontrollers used in the Internet of Things projects. He explained what microcontrollers are and how they work. These are basically self-contained system with peripherals, memory and a processor that can be used as an embedded system. Most programmable microcontrollers that are used today are embedded in other consumer products or machinery including phones, peripherals, automobiles and household appliances for computer systems. He then explained the different types of microcontrollers such Intel Edison, Arduino and Rapbery pi. He talked about how developers can chose the best micro controllers for their projects. He then listed the various applications of microcontrollers and the projects they have worked on. He also discussed how developers could start working with them.

We then had a talk on Google’s recently released library for Machine Intelligence, TensorFlow. Kennedy Jonyo explained how its flexible architecture allows developers to deploy computation to one or more CPUs or GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google’s Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well.
Lastly we had a lengthy discussion and a mini — fireside chat where developers were free to ask any question that from the whole team. This include how we started, what keeps us to gathers, what motivates us among others.

We understand and know the potential of a developer community. GDG Kimathi University has in the past engaged with different communities outside their locality and help them grow in to vibrant communities. These include GDG Multimedia, GDG Egerton University, GDG Kabarak University among others. Currently we are working with the following communities:
·        Embu University
·        Moi University
·        Laikipia University
·        Muranga University
·        Riara University

We hope to work together, organize cluster events and see them grow into successful communities. Cluster events normally result into larger and potentially more impactful events. We hope to reach out to as many people as possible and share our pioneer’s vision with them — Sharing the GDG Love. Wes shall definitely keep you posted. Stay tuned!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Powered by Blogger.