Welcome to Rural Hackers

Happy to share the great news with you!

We are proud and happy to announce that we have officially opened Anceu’s coliving doors to Rural Hackers. In this offline and free school, you can learn digital competencies in contact with an open-minded community. The aim of Rural Hackers Academy is to provide free quality education open to everyone.

In 2022 we had 18 participants, from teenagers to adults, coming to Anceu to learn technology in an inspiring ecosystem. 

Why did we start it?

Rural Hackers Academy aligns very much with our Coliving’s values, like:

– having a social impact. Rural teaches us so many things, and we want to give the rural places what we know in the shape of talent, ideas, and possibilities.

– be an inspiration for people – daily, we build a home of talent, learning from everyone.

– we do everything with a bit of technology, and we want to keep and spread further the part that changed our lives.

Rural areas of Galicia are becoming severely depopulated. This fact jeopardizes a way of living, endangers a whole tradition, and disconnects us from our roots.

We see technology as the plot twist here. Remote working can bring dramatic change to rural areas and build astounding new ecosystems.

The rural areas offer endless possibilities and a better quality of life, as demonstrated after the crisis resulting from Covid-19. 

Today, more and more people are returning to the countryside. They want to build a more sustainable life in natural environments where they can create a community of coexistence and care.

What are the objectives we want to achieve thanks to Rural Hackers?

WordPress learning 

Students will learn WordPress. We will use the WordPress community materials.

Rural Challenges

Each student will develop a project to help a local organization (e.g. a website for an LGBTQ festival in a rural village close to Anceu). 

Mentoring support

Members of the Anceu coliving community and its partners will support the students in their technological and professional development. In addition, each student will have one hour of mentoring per week to answer questions and solve challenges.

Do_Action Hackathon

We will organize an event focussed on using WordPress to give deserving charitable organizations their online presence. It was scheduled for September 2022, in collaboration with the WordPress Foundation and Pontevedra WordPress Camp. 

International Network

Students will naturally get to know people from international and national communities by being part of collaborative environments in the coliving and the communities of our partner entities. 

Meet the international Network that helped us make this happen

Inspiration is the key to creating new opportunities. We believe that connecting with the right people can change the course of your life. The key to Rural Hackers Academy is part of our international ecosystem. These are our networks:

MigraCode Europe

We are part of the fourth Edition of Migracode. It is an EU-funded project to promote Open Tech Education for refugees, migrants,  and vulnerable people. Five organizations from Sweden, Poland, Norway, Greece, and Cyprus participate in this 4th Edition. The aim is to learn from the experience of the Social Hackers Academy from Greece and the other members of the Migracode Network to create a prototype school in Spain and Sweden.

Ticket2Europe

We are part of the board of this international NGO. Thanks to them, we will have 2 European people from the European Solidarity Corps helping with the Solidarity Developers project.

Eleven Yellow

 Eleven Yellow is a development and programming company. We will have at least three team members to mentor and support the students.

WordPress Pontevedra

We will present the school in one of the monthly meetings of the WordPress community of Pontevedra, and we will have the support
of one of its founders for guidance and ideas in the project.

Creative Habitat

Creative Habitat is a network of coworking and coliving spaces to create innovative communities between Spain and Portugal.

European Creative Hubs Network

Espacio Arroelo and Anceu Coliving are part of this international Network of creative spaces in Europe. They help us in the creation of European networks.

In the weeks that followed we shared our participants and their stories, and introduced the mentors of Rural Hackers — you can read about it in Rural Hackers – A New Way Of Learning.

See also: Rural Hackers – A New Way Of Learning · Rural Hackers – The evolution · Our ECHN workshop