The month of May represented some major improvements to core OpenHatch functionality. The map, the git training mission, our bug tracker importing, and the weekly email to project maintainers saw significant improvements. Keep reading to learn the whole story.

In the OpenHatch community, we have weekly planning meetings. In the start of May, we chatted about what we wanted and wrote up a plan for what we wanted to see. What we worked on reflects the must-haves and what people wanted to work on. Here are the highlights:

• Paul Bakulich and Jessica McKellar adjusted the text that we periodically email to project maintainers to be more helpful. (This email informs them of prospective contributors and other site activity.)
• Asheesh (me) fixed the map at /people/: The old map was only good at crashing web browsers; now, after some major hints from Christopher Schmidt of openlayers.org, we have a rewritten map. It is much more responsive to use (and also much easier to maintain).
• Paul Bakulich, Mark Freeman, and Thomas Noe made the git mission more clear (in its text) and reliable (in its backend). These were Thomas’s first commits!
• Knut Hühne improved the usability of the diff/patch missions.
• Asheesh updated the front page so that, when you log in, there is custom information useful for project maintainers. If you’re a project maintainer, we’d love feedback on how this new space could be more useful to you.
• Asheesh exposed the ability to edit the bug trackers associated with your project by editing your project. (Just go to a project page like the one for Tahoe-LAFS and click “Edit” in the top-right.) This builds on backend code by Jack and frontend suggestions by Jessica Ledbetter.
• Claudio Mezzasalma improved the data snapshots to include tags from people’s profiles.
• Mark Freeman added a “Usual IRC nick” field to the profile (a useful feature by itself, and also the basis of a to-be-created tutorial for new contributors on modifying the profile).

This work represents some major fixes to long-standing problems with the site:

• In the past, the map was too slow to use.
• In the past, the only way to tell us about bug trackers that a project uses was through editing a wiki page.

I’m really glad that we addressed these issues, and I look forward to hearing about the issues that bug you the most, or the features you most need. Join us on #openhatch on irc.freenode.net, or post to the Devel mailing list, and let us know.

These are the faces of the people who pushed the code forward this month:

You can check out the full list of bugs closed during the May milestone. We’re gearing up for the June milestone, and looking to spend some time planning in a more big-picture fashion. Paul Bakulich sent an email to the Devel list along those lines, and during the last meeting we wrote up some goals for the next year, wikified by Karen.

(Image credit: Taste the… Nuts and bolts? by Sasha Wolff on Flickr. Follow the link and read the story behind the photo!)