Long time no see! It's been great to watch what's been going on in Sudoroom life, the move to Omni-Commons, the crowdfunding campaign, the classes and all the rest through the telescopic lens of the Interwebs. I miss you guys, though and look forward to visiting when I'm down in Oakland again.

Today I'm writing to ask if you guys would be willing to be our host site for the Oakland site for the International Space Apps Challenge April 10-12, 2015. 

My colleague Lindsay Oliver is moving down to Oakland on March 1, and since she'll be a new local, we decided to celebrate her move by asking for the Oakland Space Apps license. Now that they've said that she can run that event, we need to find a site and hunt down sponsors to fund it. I thought about a couple different possible hosts, but then it dawned on me that Sudoroom and the Omni-Commons would be a WAY better site than any other I could think of.

What we would would need from you is SPACE. Well,actually, we need space and internet and electricity. 

We will find sponsors to pay for food, beverages, and prizes (NB: We don't do cash prizes. We celebrate collaboration, not competition). If you guys have leads to help us find those sponsors, that's always appreciated, but not at all required.

What you get: The awesomest hackathon of the year in your space, exposure to people who don't normally show up to hackerspaces but would probably love yours, mention in any press we get for the event, and of course, listing as a major sponsor of the Oakland site of ISAC. 

International Space Apps Challenge is a global hackathon with over 80 sites worldwide. This will be the fourth year of the event, and Geeks Without Bounds has been involved since the very first one. NASA curates challenges that have ranged from jewellery making to data hacking, educational development to interplanetary network design. There is literally something for everyone at a Space Apps Challenge, and it is our absolute favorite hackathon of the year. (Considering that we may do as many as 25 in any given year, that's saying something.)

Geeks Without Bounds is a nonprofit organization fiscally sponsored by the School Factory. We support humanitarian open source projects through a combination of hackathons and an accelerator program where we take promising projects through a six month series of mentorships to help them reach sustainability. In the first year of Space Apps, GWOB ran the flagship event at Tech Shop in San Francisco. In the second year we organized three sites including Glasgow, Scotland and Krakow, Poland. Last year we were involved with 5 different sites around the globe. This year we will be organizing just two: Oakland, CA and Greensboro, NC. (Although people that we trained up will be taking over organization of sites in every city where we've organized Space Apps events in the past!)

GWOB hackathons are always a little different than the stereotypical hackathon event. You can read more about our take on the form at http://gwob.org/why-i-love-hackathons/ And because GWOB was deeply involved in the original design of Space Apps when it first started, the global organization shares many of our core values, meaning that if you enjoy Space Apps in one location one year, you will probably enjoy it at other locations in other years just as much.