Once a month, we breathlessly tell you that the site is updated to the latest release. This is that time! We’re pretty excited about the 0.11.02 release; we focused on improving the experience for people trying to grow their projects.

As we wrote, the theme for the release was the experience for project maintainers. These release notes focus on the big improvements that are “on-theme”, some big changes for our own development workflow, a call for contributors, and a note about an outreach event run by some OpenHatch people.

The big changes related to the maintainer experience were addressing these issues:

• 239: The cron job that sends the weekly emails — isn’t sending them (paulproteus)

• 287: Allow users to specify which projects they get new contributor notifications for (jesstess)

• 281: Make (non-logged-in) landing page ‘modal’ for each major type of contributor (aldeka, ktarnowski, paulproteus)

• 297: Write a document for best practices in contacting new interested contributors (jesstess)

One big change you’ll see immediately is the new front page. Go ahead and take a look!

There were also some big internal changes, led by Jack Grigg. The meeting bot will help us stay organized, and the central login system addresses one of the early complaints about the site.

• 248: Have a meeting bot on IRC (pythonian4000)

• 264: Create a central login system (pythonian4000)

The list of 41 bugs closed during the milestone is in the bug tracker!

These people contributed to this month’s release:

Also, Zathraz from IRC contributed.

We need to grow! IRC, web, and mailing list lurkers, come chat with us and we’ll put you to work. (-:

We’ll mentor and help find tickets that are both interesting to you and a good fit for your background. If you know or want to learn Python and/or Django, we’ll teach you. If you want to give us advice on web design, we’d love to hear your feedback.

We’re also particularly looking for people who want to help projects write high-quality English text for the Starling project.

Finally, a bunch of us ran a big outreach event to new Python programmers in Boston the first weekend of March. This is the second event we’ve run (the first was in Philadelphia). Jessica wrote a big page about it on the Boston Python Meetup group’s wiki.

Thanks for reading this far! These notes were written by Jessica, Jack, Asheesh, and a few others on a PiratePad.

If you like OpenHatch and you want to get involved as a programmer, event co-organizer, web designer, or text writer, the best thing to do is to join our chat room and say “hi”!

(P.S. About the photo at the top: I took it last February at a concert. If you recognize the band, leave a comment.)