Sunday in Open Source Cafe Shimokitazawa is a little different from when I come here for coworking.

CoderDojo

Two of WordCamp Tokyo volunteers who are students (jr. high and high school) gave a mini presentation. Daisuke talked about their involvement in WordPress community, and Tomoyuki showed some WordPress sites he and his friend worked on. Not only younger kids but many of the adults looked pretty impressed by their activity.

I taught HTML and CSS to another 7th grader, and several other mentors gave hands-on Scratch lessons.

2 weeks ago I visited Kushimoto to help a friend start a CoderDojo there (I wrote a Japanese blog post about it), on the way back from WordCamp Osaka. One of the volunteers who participated the Kushimoto event will be launching a dojo in Nishinomiya next month too!

Librize Starter Kit

After CoderDojo, I helped assemble this “library starter kit” box, designed by @cognitom. He is the UI designer for Librize.com Facebook app / web service, which this kit is meant to be used with.

The package consists of a barcode scanner, booklet on how to start a “book spot” on Librize, stickers and some other necessary documents. 6 of us built and packed 19 sets of these, with X-Acto knife, ruler, and stapler in our hands. Reminded me of package design class in college!

Librize lets you easily create a database of your bookshelf in places like office, cafe, school, making it super easy to keep track of your books online. Each book spot owner can choose their own book rental policy. There’s an optional Facebook account integration in which visitors/members can check out books using their FB login.

@cognitom and @chshit will be selling these at their booth in Library Fair & Forum Expo in Yokohama starting next Tuesday.

When we finished cutting, folding, stapling and taping, we had pizza and “Smile Potatoes” 🙂