Geekdom plans to launch the Open Cloud Academy early next year to teach veterans and the public technology skills.
The Open Cloud Academy will be located on the 6th floor of the Weston Centre downtown. Its eight-week classes will begin in the middle of January.
“We’re still working on the plans,” said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom. “It’s very complex when we’re trying to bring in Rackspace, the military, USAA, Red Hat and us.”
Nick Longo, director and co-founder of Geekdom
The classes, valued at $6,000 to $15,000, will cost around $500, and instructors will teach the students to become Linux system administrators in coding languages like PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python. At the end, the students will take a test and receive a certificate as a Linux administrator. Linux is the preferred operating system for hosting providers in the cloud.
Geekdom is working in alliance with USAA on the Open Cloud Academy.
The Open Cloud Academy is one of the latest ventures of the year-old Geekdom, a collaborative co-working space, which will be celebrating its one year anniversary at a party a the Weston Centre on Friday.
In the last year, Geekdom has become the largest co-working space in Texas with 500 members, occupying 45,000 square feet at the Weston Centre. It recently expanded to the 10th floor in addition to the 11th floor. And now it’s taking over the 6th floor for the Open Cloud Academy. Geekdom also expanded to a location in San Francisco and is eyeing further expansion into China.
“We offer a space for the country’s brightest entrepreneurs to connect, work and grow,” Longo said in a news release. “Our focus since day one has been simple: to attract talented startup companies to San Antonio with a dynamic space that offers them an opportunity to think and work creatively with the freedom to explore their business ideas with likeminded companies and mentors. In this way, we can stimulate two things: San Antonio’s economic engine and drive entrepreneurs that will create up to 40 percent of all new jobs in the next 20 years.”
So far, Geekdom has held more than 220 tech events including SparkEd, a program that instills leadership skills in middle school kids while teaching about entrepreneurship, robotics, web design and programming during a weekend workshop. Every weekend, 30 kids participate in a two-day program to build, program, market and sell a robot.
Geekdom co-founder and Rackspace Hosting Chairman Graham Weston
Geekdom co-founder and Rackspace Hosting Chairman Graham Weston called the site a pioneer in San Antonio.
“We created a place for entrepreneurs to inject themselves into a true ecosystem on which they can thrive and take advantage of a powerful network of influencers,” Weston said in a news release. “We want to make San Antonio the “Cloud Capital of the World.” Having a thriving startup community is the foundation of that ecosystem. Our mission to take promising ideas and turn them into fundable ideas is becoming reality faster than any of us could have hoped.”
Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News
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