On Wednesday of this week, tens of thousands of developers, gamers, geeks and hackers will descend on Expo Guadalajara for Campus Party 2016.
The five-day, round-the-clock technology festival is a magnet for entrepreneurial tech savvy folks, most of them young, and many of whom camp out in tents on the Expo floor for the duration of the event.
This year’s event is wrapped around the theme ”Feel the Future,” and will cover a broad range of subjects, including seminars on the future of startups, renewable energy, the internet of things, information privacy and more, says Sharon Marcel Flores, Campus Party’s content director. There will also be discussion on the threat posed to the job market by robotics, she says.
Campus Party 2016 will try to set a new world record for the number of people participating in a hackathon – an event which brings together computer programmers and others involved in software development in collaborative projects. As many as 20,000 people could take part, organizers say.
Also this year, the metro-area municipality of Zapopan is sponsoring a competition for participants to come up with innovative ideas on how to use the Villas Panamericanas, the abandoned athletes’ village built for the 2011 Pan American Games. Due to environmental concerns, the city has ruled out using the complex for residential apartments, as per the original plan.
Campus Party brings together online communities, programmers, bloggers, governments, universities and students, and has a broad focus, covering technology innovation and electronic entertainment, with an emphasis on free software, programming, astronomy, social media, gaming, green technology, robotics, security networks and computer modeling.
The event’s stated goal is to gather the best talent in areas regarding technology and the Internet to share experiences and innovate for a “better tomorrow.”
Campus Party 2016 takes place Wednesday, June 29 through Sunday, July 3 at Expo Guadalajara, Avenida Mariano Otero and Las Rosas.