Nahual is an open community integrated mostly by software professionals and those former students that after the course started working, studing in a university and now keep participating as referents or even sometimes are at front of the class. Our main objective is social inclusion, and we do it by sharing the experience and knowledge but also the relationships and oportunities that we developed on our professional life.
It is a project where where no one pays and no one is paid, that started as social work in 2004 and became a course like now in 2009. We present the project to software companies so they give to the studentes the oportunity of an interview, and stay beside them through the work search process and later, during their firsts experiences. Up to now, there are more of 20 former students that got a job as software testers, many of which also started studing in the university.
On 2013 Nahual was awarded with the Sadosky price for Digital Inclusion and also the Golden Sadosky. http://www.cessi.org.ar/sadosky/ganadores-2013 [1].
Nahual has also been reproduced in other four other nodes (Bariloche, La Plata, San Telmo, La Paternal), and there is people in Uruguay and Colombia working to re-create the experience. On the other nodes there might be different activities, such as programming for kids or hardware reparation. What they all have in common is the objective of share and include from what we know, that is the software technology