#GeoHackeo, the GeoLatinas hackathon - Testing our Digital Literacy toolkit

Abstract:

GeoLatinas is a rapid, member-driven and circular growing organization. Our membership has increased by 24% over the last 6 months. From this fast-paced growth and influx of new members with new interests, the scope of GeoLatinas initiatives is also increasing, and manual administration of organizational tasks is becoming burdensome. Within the GeoLatinas organization, we recognized the need to learn open source programming languages and created the GeoLatinas Coding Group. The Coding Group’s main focus was to provide sessions that allowed us to learn and develop python programming skills as a community. As we continued to grow as an initiative, we began to explore different virtual programming events to attend. In the participation of these events, we quickly realized that the Latina presence is minimal. Therefore, we created a GeoLatinas Hackathon “GeoHackeo” not only as a need to increase representation of Latinx programmers but also to address the needs of the GeoLatinas organization through python programming. Through our participation in the global open-source community, we learned that hackathons are a great community-driven initiative to make robust developments over short periods in time. To assess our ever-growing membership, we decided to create a hackathon focused on building automatic tasks to support our members: our “GeoHackeo.” We have 6 projects, which range from visualizing our membership and automatically updating this database, to identifying GeoLatina experts from keyword searches, to assessing how we engage with other Latinas, BIPOC, scientists, the media, and the public through social media. Join us as we discuss our development of the GeoHackeo, the skills we have developed to work collaboratively such as GitHub, and a summary of the projects we completed during this 1.5 month long hackathon!