As you may already know, last night we officially concluded our experimental and entirely bootstrapped Batch-0 at Betahaus. These last six weeks have been an amazing journey of learning, with several workshops led by organisers and hackers-in-residence but also by learners themselves who, in addition, took part in daily stand-ups, reviews and demos, Q&A sessions and pair programming. The results and feedback far exceed our expectations. It’s amazing to see just how much learners can accomplish when you give them the right environment and the support they need. Hackership works. Learners learned with more motivation and drive than any of us have seen before. It has been an incredible learning experience – for all of us.

So it was with one eye laughing and the other one crying that we handed over graduation certificates to our learners yesterday. We are now more sure than ever that this programme is worth pursuing, it is needed and can and will empower women and men to look beyond their current skillset and dream big. For this reason we are very happy to announce our crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise funds to continue this programme with the next Batch, Batch-1 – the first full 12-week-long edition of Hackership. We are looking to raise €20,000 by the 2nd of February in order to rent a space, buy furniture and get started on organising our next successful batch. This of course won't only benefit future Hackership participants but OpenTechSchool and learners of all levels: while Hackership will use the rooms during the day from Monday to Thursday – OpenTechSchool Berlin will run more of its events there in the evenings and on weekends. After all, it will be a space dedicated to learning tech, we had better make full use of it.

So, if you have yet to decide where your charitable donation should go this holiday season, how about putting it to work on building the most amazing tech-learning-experience-hacker community this side of the pond has seen! We have great gifts available, created explicitly for our crowdfunding campaign. Please check it out and help spread the word.

Happy holidays!