Wazzup Pilipinas!
8Layer Academy visited us on September 3, 2015 to present the winning teams who bagged the 3 top places in the Hack UP competition recently held at the GT Toyota building of the University of the Philippines over the previous weekend.
The winners were from the following very promising apps: "Pulong", "Tara" and "Identinantion" that all had a common theme of "culture." These apps were designed to highlight related ways to bring the people closer to the Philippine culture as they respectively tackle the somewhat negative "Filipino time" culture and how to sort of address it by making people more aware of their current location during a call for a meeting, a more innovative way to gather people for culture-related events, and another app that seeks to bridge the gap to how little or wrong we know of the Philippine culture.
These young minds all seek to provide answers to the problems of society through this hackathon, and many more of its other runs at different venues all targeting the youth specifically college students.
I'm still waiting for their official press release so I can help share to you their accomplishments but I'm just too excited to share this already. These kind of news are the ones that we really need to support as they help build a more constructive hobby or past time for the youth. What could be better than spending your time and talent thinking of ways to improve the nation.
It has been a dream of mine to improve my services here at WazzupPilipinas.com but since I am not knowledgeable of programming or developing an app, my site is limited to just implementing free ready-made themes for its layout. I really would like to implement something more interactive and engaging so that I can encourage citizen correspondence within the Philippines, and who knows, maybe the other Pinoys all over the world, and even our foreign friends to contribute and get involved in sharing news and other happening from where they are.
So maybe one of these days I will sponsor my own hackathon and the objective would be to develop better apps or site design for my blog.
Why not? WazzupPilipinas.com aims to bring better ways to reach the people and get them more interested in better news and information that would truly be substantial and useful for their daily lives instead of watching trivial shows on TV that is only providing them fun and entertainment but does not really give them ideas or the motivation to become more proactiv and socially responsible citiczens of the Philippines.
We hope that more and more people follow the path of 8Layer Academy to truly provide an avenue for the youth who wants to genuinely contribute to the welfare of society and not just to use it to gain fame or fortune.
The country needs everyone's cooperation because we cannot expect the government to be able to provide for everything that we need. It has been proven so many times that the best ideas that are currently being used right now came from the least expected groups or individuals who were discovered through movements like these. It is just a shame that we could have made more wonderful discoveries and achievements that we could all call purely our own Filipino venture if only the local investors and government agencies have been more reachable when it comes to providing support an funding for our great Filipino minds.
Well, there's always hope as long as there are groups like 8Layer Academy. Thank you and more power to the people behind it.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
