Game mechanics. Game mechanics. Game mechanics. Say it three times fast.

Is it so terribly awful that most of our discussions of game mechanics over the last three months were punctuated by tittering? I’ve been saving this illustration for WEEKS.

Anyway. Actual discussion of game mechanics and how it applies to OpenHatch coming soon!

We now support OpenID, a technology that makes signing into websites less annoying. On the front page, you can sign into OpenHatch with your username on another network such as Google, Flickr, LiveJournal or a website you control.

With OpenID, you have just one account, on a trusted network, that works all over the Web. This means you spend less brain on shepherding lots of different accounts (one for every single bloomin’ website you visit!) and have more time for actually useful things (or genuinely useless things, if you enjoy those).

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A few days ago, my friend Terence introduced me to Pivotal Tracker. It’s a web service for planning a software project.

It has a few fantastic aspects:

• It is beautiful and a pleasure to use.
• It helps remind us to review each other’s work.
• It is real-time; if I wonder what someone is working on, I can see that immediately without even leaving my own task list. What a stress relief!
• It helps us see how fast we are moving through our project. However fast our “project velocity” is, Pivotal Tracker adjusts later weeks so that our expectations are always realistic.

Even though we are allowed to use it for free, we give up some control to use it.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Karen Rustad

OpenHatch, Inc.
952-210-6598
karen@openhatch.org
http://openhatch.org

Shotput Ventures Alumnus OpenHatch Announces Open Source Developer Network

ATLANTA, Georgia — August 10, 2009 — OpenHatch Inc. has announced an online network for open source software contributors. OpenHatch helps software developers showcase their experience in the free / open source software community, and discover new ways to participate. The site promotes cross-pollination and collaboration by uniting people, data and resources from open source projects across the web.

Contributors to open source can try out OpenHatch’s private alpha by signing up at http://openhatch.org. OpenHatch automatically compiles portfolios for contributors based on a submitted email address or username. The service also recommends new opportunities via a personalized, cross-project bug aggregator.

Development on OpenHatch continues apace. A mentoring program, recruitment tools for project coordinators, and an experience-based reputation system are some of the features expected before the public beta release later this year. “We live and die by feedback from the open source community,” says co-founder Asheesh Laroia. “If you’re an open source developer, we want you to tell us what would make participation in open source easier and more fun for you.”

OpenHatch is a team of three. Laroia, OpenHatch’s CEO and lead engineer, is a Developer for Debian, one of the largest open source projects, and received an M.S.E. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University. Raphael Krut-Landau is president and lead designer; a fellow Hopkins alumnus, he has built web communities since 2004. Karen Rustad, who directs business development and research, is a former board member of Students for Free Culture and worked on viral media and outreach for library advocate SPARC.

OpenHatch is one of eight companies in the 2009 class of Atlanta-based Shotput Ventures’ startup incubator program. The alpha release coincides with Shotput Ventures’ Demo Day event, a joint presentation for over 100 investors, entrepreneurs and members of the press.

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Hello, all. My name is Karen and I’m the intern for OpenHatch, an Atlanta-based startup working to facilitate collaboration and development in the open source community. OpenHatch’s co-founders are Asheesh Laroia, Nelson Pavlosky, and Raphael Krut-Landau.

We’ll be posting here about company hijinks, product info, and interesting stories and stats we find around the web. Hope to see you around as we experience the headrush of building our first startup.