Hello,
I have been involved in FIRST for many years and I recently became involved in a new project called
The Hacker Fair. Basically, the idea is to have a job fair where the candidates are at booths demonstrating their personal work and the recruiters walk around with engineers who help pick out candidates to hire. This is suppose to put people in a situation where real skills and real talent lead to hiring...and both the recruiters and the candidates go home happy.
Hacker Fair 0 was pretty successful, we had a lot of big names including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Mozilla and Facebook. It also got
press attention. We're doing a Hacker Fair 1 in early April.
In some ways I consider all of this to stand on the shoulders of the things that FIRST works toward. I would like to explain how FIRST is such a good example of this on a slide for an
Ignite talk I'm doing soon on Hacker Fairs. The top of the slide is going to say Dean's "We are what we celebrate" and below that I'd like to put a photo from a FIRST event. I know there are a million photographs of FIRST on CD and elsewhere on the internet, but I would really like to get permission from the team and/or photographer before I use an image. It needs to be pretty high quality (it is going to get projected onto a big screen), I will credit the photographer and team I promise, and I need it pretty soon (my slides are due Tuesday. Sorry. This is what I get for procrastinating).
The Hacker Fair is totally not for profit. Tickets only cost if they are bought during the week before the fair (they are available for free for several months before that). That is to discourage floods of people from coming in and wrecking up all our event planning numbers (food, tables, building space etc). All money collected goes to
The Hacker Dojo, which is a non-profit community center which holds free classes and tons of conferences for people who want to learn about all manner of technical things. It is super good and wholesome, and I promise to not imply for a moment that you or your team or FIRST endorses the Hacker Fair movement. I'd just really appreciate a photo to use. I want to show people an example of how reshaping what we, as a culture, celebrate can change the way the world works.
Thanks,
Katy