On April 8th, 2018, YorubaName.com would be hosting its first ever hackathon.

At its very onset, the Yorùbá Names Project has always been envisioned as a project to be driven by communal and collective effort. Which is not surprising since language and culture, are artifacts that are forged by the commons. Who owns a people’s culture? or a people’s language? Or a peoples volume of names, other than the people themselves?

If someone adds an entry to the site, a second person updated the etymology to correct an error, a third person updated the geolocation while a fifth person added links to famous people bearing that name: At the end of the day, who owns the content that was created by these 5 people? The simple answer is no one owns it, but at the same time, it belongs to all of them.

This is the reason why we have embraced an Open Source model for the development of the Yorùbá Names Project. So that it can belong to all. All codebase for the project is available on GitHub. All development is done in the open on GitHub. All issue tracking is also done on GitHub. Everybody and anybody are welcome to contribute code to the codebase.

If someone designs the look and feel of the YorubaName website, and another hacks together the CSS and HTML, while another puts together the backend code that powers the site, who owns this technical creation that powers the dictionary? Again, the simple answer is: it belongs to all.

That is the spirit of collaborative and communal development we have embraced with the project. The Hackathon, come April, is yet another expression of this communal approach.

It is going to be an event where we bring together developers/designers, and together, work on fixing issues and implementing some of the feature requests that have been noted down on GitHub.

It would be on April 8th, 2018, and would be hosted at HotelsNG. The address is No 3, Birrel Avenue, off Herbert Macaulay Way, Sabo, Yaba, Lagos. It will be from 12:00 noon to 5:30 pm, its going to be a time of coding, debugging, fixing issues, learning and interacting with other developers!

Registration is now opened, so if you plan to attend, please register by following the link http://bit.ly/YN7Hackathon.

I would be providing more details, in the coming days, regarding various aspect of the Hackathon. Like the agenda, things to do to get prepared etc. So do keep an eye on this space, or better still follow me (@dadepo) and the YorubaName project(@YorubaName) on Twitter.