From 24 to 28 of May the MediActivism European Hackcamp is taking place. During five days different people with diverse backgrounds from across Europe will be meeting in an online encounter to discuss and work on some media contents related to the right to the city. It’s a way to think together and discuss bringing personal, professional, and local experiences. Despite worldwide circumstances, it’s a good time to reflect on how we can improve the quality of our daily lives, isn’t it? But first of all, what is a hackcamp?
This encounter is a format that stems from the energy of hackathons, which are a kind of encounters where programmer communities work together to develop collective software. In the case of MediActivism European Hackcamp, we want to seize on the opportunity to link stories about right to the city struggles across Europe, bonding media activists in different European cities. In addition, this chance is going to be used to exchange methods, skills, and strategies for media activism creating a space to swap knowledge and expertise. And finally, the Hackcamp is going to be a good time to contribute with the right to the city’s struggles to a European public sphere. As the project has been supporting activists who have been changing their cities with the production of contents and campaigns, the event is a perfect time to articulate policy demands using the claims produced in the previous activities of the project.
The Hackcamp is organized in four different tables or workgroups, each one with a specific goal to produce a prototype by combining the expertise and knowledge of the participants in the tables. Let’s see what these workgroups and their aims are.
#1 Caring City Map: how would a real caring city look like? To answer this question, the participants of this table should visualize the common topics, challenges, and tools related to the right to the city which should be used as the key to developing a visual road map and a manifesto for a city that is human-scaled.
#2 Solarpunk Methodologies: Solarpunk is a sub-genre of Science Fiction that provides a fruitful framework for designing emerging and utopian futures in formal and non-formal educational contexts. This prototype should seek to create a replicable pedagogical experience with solarpunk and social imaginations in its center.
#3 Gaming the City: from bots and apps to playful mapping, gaming is the source of potential “city hacks” and political usages of digital media. The participants of this table should produce a working prototype in which civic engagement is achieved through a playful engagement with the urban environment.
#4 Soundscapes of Europe: at the crossroads between artistic and journalistic practices, the Soundscapes prototype aims to convey the current struggles of European citizenship in its diversity through layers of urban ambiance, voices, and “accented” (singular) experiences.
#5 Collaborative Journalism: How to: this table's prototype will support an already ongoing process which is developing and infraestructure for mediamakers to eork towards the production of stories for the European public sphere.
We will be sharing the process and the outcomes on social media and there will be a public presentation at the end of it. So write down these dates: on May 24th we will introduce the Hackcamp in detail and at the end of the week, on May 28th, we will have the public presentation of the prototypes. We are going to share more details soon, so stay tuned!
The European Hackcamp is being produced by MediActivism partners, it is coordinated by European Cultural Foundation and facilitated by ZEMOS98.