Strong Digital Appetite at the Grassroots
Shenal Harakh is the founder of her eponymous software development agency Shenal
(www.shenal.online), which builds tech products for startup clients around the world.
She is currently based in Fiji and is running workshops to digitally upskill communities. Head to
HttPs://fiJI.sHENAL.ONLINE/ to sign up and keep up to date with new workshops, or follow her work on LinkedIn: Shenal Harakh or
Twitter: @shenalyo.
Irecently wrapped up another website-building workshop in Suva, a half-day interactive session designed to teach anyone, regardless of their technical expertise, how to build a business website or portfolio page.
When announcing the workshops and calling out for participants, I never know what level of interest to expect and from whom. Without funding or any partnerships, running these workshops has meant that I rely on the goodwill of my network to like, share, and retweet the announcements.
I’m incredibly grateful for those who have taken the time to share my workshops and work. The words of positivity and excitement for grassroots-level change have captured my attention.
The workshops are usually capped at 10 or 15 participants to keep the teaching as personalised as possible to each person’s use case and learning pace.
The ability to learn each participant’s name, business, or story, and work with them on the day is something intentionally designed into the teaching and class setup.
From Aaran Savu Faktaufon who is 12-years-old and building his mother’s computer and now her company website, to a retiree wanting to know what goes into creating a website; this time round I found myself with a final group of 16 participants with different needs and backgrounds, and more interestingly an extremely healthy appetite for questions, knowledge, and connecting.
In four hours we went through the fundamentals of building what a site looks like, how its information is stored in a database, email responses, hosting, and scrolling behaviour. To my joy the more advanced topics were prompted by the participants who just wanted to know how things work and how to create it themselves. One of the participants, Sereima Yabaki- Nanovu, an Independent Consultant said, “The delivery was easy to follow through, the content was simple and fun; even learning a new app like Airtable. It was funthoroughly enjoyed the hands-on experience.”
Clarence Dass, cartoonist and creator of Sala Ni Yalo: Patch of the Shades said “I found the process to be very intuitive. It was nice to have Shenal there to talk us through it and help us out when we got stuck on something.
Once the process started getting clear to me, it got exciting because then I was just coming up with all these ideas I had for what I wanted my site to look like.”
Freelancer Jasmine Khan who provides professional resume writing services said, “Shenal’s workshop was delightfully engaging and very educational, the way she was able to explain very complicated technical concepts into bite-sized info was spot-on.
“Everyone was engaged and excited throughout the workshop.
It was motivating and refreshing to meet like-minded individuals and entrepreneurs, we all left with a great network of people to potentially work alongside in the future, including a completely functional and sustainable website of our own.”
Currently I’m gathering interest for the next workshop which will either be in Nadi or Suva.
If you want to build a website, meet new people, or have ever wondered how things work, then do sign up!