Photo: Karen Rustad

Welcome to the 4th OpenHatch newsletter!

OpenHatch celebrated Ada Lovelace Day with a post honoring Personal Genome Project hacker Madeleine Ball:

Madeleine’s work is an inspiration, and a reminder of how to apply free software principles in a new domain while staying true to software freedom.

Also see Ada Lovelace Day posts from the Ada Initiative, Free Software Foundation, and Wikimedia.

Event wrapups

We posted event wrapups from two Open Source Comes to Campus events: Johns Hopkins University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Along with photos and thanks, each post notes two actual contributions made by event participants.

Our events mailing list featured a useful thread on evaluation metrics for events. Join the list to share your experiences and get help with making your events beginner-friendly.

OpenHatch web development

Jessica McKellar, OpenHatch board member, mentored at Hacker School. Her talk about how to contribute to FLOSS, including getting people to step through the OpenHatch training missions led to new contributors to the OpenHatch web app code: Becca Liss and Sharadha Ramakrishnan. Welcome!

Asheesh added the commit that removes the most stuff ever so far: “Showing 43 changed files with 4 (line) additions and 9,496 (line) deletions” (he went on a removal spree after marktraceur mentioned ‘senseknocker’ on IRC and wondered what it is, namely a three-years-old artifact of an old idea we never chased very far).

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

Paul Tagliamonte of #openhatch and debian-mentors asks, What is holding you back from becoming a maintainer of a package in Debian?

An excellent GNOME Newcomers Tutorial by Marina Zhurakhinskaya:

This tutorial was very much inspired by the OpenHatch setup instructions, missions and workshops!

Upstream University offers a course for professional developers who want to learn how to contribute to free software projects. This is much needed, and the price (US$3500) reasonable for corporate education. But in the OpenHatchy glorious future, contributing to free software projects will be part of the educational experience of all computer science students, and many more!

A retrospective on a recent MediaWiki hackathon in Berlin has lots of details on goals, logistics, and post-event surveys.

Get involved

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