OpenHatch newsletter, December 2012
Welcome to the 5th OpenHatch newsletter!
The end of the year is coming, and our non-profit can use your assistance. If you can give anything, from $2 to $200 or more, we’d appreciate your donation and will put it to work bringing more people and more different kinds of people into free software: Donate now.
A few weeks ago, we highlighted Kevin Carillo’s Ph.D. research on newcomers’ experiences in free software projects. In early 2012, he interviewed Asheesh (a “huge help,” says Kevin). Since then we’ve worked together to get the survey into more communities. He has received over 350 responses so far! If you’ve joined the projects he’s surveying (Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD (including PC-BSD), GNOME, Gentoo, KDE, Mozilla, NetBSD, OpenSUSE, Python, Ubuntu and Wikimedia) in the past two years, do take his survey.
Events
We’re aiming for at least 3-4 Open Source Comes to Campus events from January through March 2013. We’ve been discussing it on the Events list; you can read the thread in the archives, or (best) just subscribe and join in!
We’ll have a special focus on open source and gender diversity in 2013, working with women’s colleges and women in CS groups to organize workshops and measure our results. If your company would be interested in sponsoring these workshops, drop us a line: hello@openhatch.org.
You might remember our productive PyCon sprint this year. Tim Ansell (mithro) made a video introducing what sprints are, and OpenHatch sprinters feature prominently in it. Very prominently….
We’ve had the honor of helping Sheila Miguez organize this weekend’s second Chicago Python Workshop. It is a “women and their friends” event, and the organizers ran into some prospective and actual attendees who, to put it mildly, did not understand the full purpose of the event. Asheesh helped them write emails to communicate their goals clearly and tactfully. We have put together sample text for everything from welcoming trans women to asking a problematic attendee not to come back. Give it a read and use our text when you find yourself in an awkward spot.
OpenHatch board members Jessica McKellar, Karen Rustad, and Asheesh Laroia all had talks accepted into the PyCon US 2013 program, and Jessica is keynoting! Hope to see you there!
OpenHatch web tech
We recently finished a rewrite of the most complex part of the website.
For a few weeks, we temporarily disabled listing project Q&A on the front page of the site due to heavy spamming. We wrote a quick tool that used SpamBayes to despam the site. Additionally, we de-spammed the forum where people ask for help with open source contribution and our training missions.
Welcome to Lloyd Watkin, who made his first commit in November, fixing a broken link our README.
OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web
A team of seven people put together 24 Pull Requests, a site to encourage you to contribute to open source projects hosted on Github during December. Check it out and sign up!
The GNOME project is running a free software mentorship program called Outreach Program for Women. The program connects mentors with women contributing to open source, offering a paid internship in a community. Participating organizations include GNOME, the Wikimedia Foundation, OpenStack, Fedora, and more.
The secret of the amazing growth of the LibreOffice development community: “Easy Hacks”, like training wheels for programmers. #SFSCon
(OpenHatch aggregates bitesize bugs from over 300 projects.)
Canonical Ltd CEO Jane Silber, asked What advice would you give to women who would like to get into the technology industry but are hesitant or not sure how to do this?:
Know yourself, your interests, your strengths and play to those strengths. Don’t be embarrassed to seek support, advice or mentoring, and don’t run away at the first bump in the road. In interview situations, women are typically judged on actual experience while men are typically judged on perceived potential, so gain relevant experience through academic experience or, of course, contributions to an open source project!
Get involved
We can always use more people on our IRC channel to discuss events and the like. If you’re a programmer, get in touch on the Devel mailing list!
And it bears repeating: as a non-profit, we rely on the community for support. We need your help to get more people involved in open source, so please donate now.