A year ago the OpenHatch blog announced three big changes: transition to nonprofit status, outreach events, and Asheesh Laroia as full-time project lead. https://openhatch.org/blog/2011/openhatch-gains-full-time-project-lead-transitioning-into-a-non-profit/

Since then, Asheesh and a large number of OpenHatch contributors have been very busy. Browse or subscribe to http://openhatch.org/blog and http://identi.ca/openhatch or http://twitter.com/openhatch to see and keep up to date. Or, with a little more latency, read this newsletter (you’re reading the first issue now): mail [un]subscription at http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/announce or browse/subscribe to http://openhatch.org/blog/tag/newsletter

OpenHatch ideas spreading

“Jessica [McKellar] and Asheesh’s presentation changed our whole outlook on what is possible for the Boston Ruby community. In 40 minutes, they opened our eyes to how we were stunting ourselves as a community and excited us by laying out such a clear, practical, and feasible outreach strategy that we could follow to change things dramatically in a short period of time.”
–Daniel Choi of Boston Ruby
https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/the-steps-boston-ruby-is-taking-to-become-friendly-to-beginners/

Watch Jessica and Asheesh’s presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrITN6GZDu4 with further presentation background at https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/the-boston-python-workshop-at-pycon-2012/

Events

At PyCon 2012 (venue for above presentation) 10 people worked on OpenHatch tools https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/ten-contributors-hacked-oh-during-pycon-sprints/

OpenHatch again sprinted in May, also thanks to Python Software Foundation support https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/may-sprint/

Our most recent campus event was at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/openhatch-goes-to-rpi-concluding-our-spring-2012-university-tour/ with special thanks to the Rensselaer Center for Open Source, Kitware, and Nokia.

We’re currently scheduling 2012-2013 academic year campus events; see http://campus.openhatch.org/upcoming-events/ to have OpenHatch visit your campus!

July 10-11 OpenHatch helped run the two-day hackathon at Wikimania https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon

Get involved

https://openhatch.org/wiki/Get_involved lists some ways to get directly involved in OpenHatch, from helping newcomers to working on OpenHatch tools to organizing an OpenHatch event to donating to support our work … https://openhatch.org/donate/ comes with the non-profit organization territory. You can also use https://openhatch.org/search/ to find volunteer opportunities with 309 different open source projects, including “bite-sized” bugs. Every form of involvement is deeply appreciated and welcomed.

Finally, thanks to rsync.net for an ongoing in-kind donation https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/thanking-rsync-net-for-donated-backup-space/