The list of talks, tutorials and posters accepted to PyCon 2014 was announced yesterday. Excitedly, we took to Twitter to congratulate the many OpenHatch community members who had their proposals accepted – only to realize there’s no way they’d all fit in a single tweet! We decided to write a blog post instead.

We’re so honored that the following people have taken time in the past to contribute to OpenHatch, and we’re looking forward to seeing them all at PyCon!

The OpenHatch team at the PyCon 2012 sprint.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya is giving a talk on the Outreach Program for Women, which she organizes for the GNOME Foundation. Marina has volunteered as a mentor at several Open Source Comes to Campus events, where she always makes sure to mention OPW – even when she can’t come to events, we make sure students know about this opportunity.

Sheila Miguez is presenting a poster on ResearchCompendia, an open source scientific publishing platform she’s helped build as part of her work at Columbia University. Sheila has been a mentor at Open Source Comes to Campus events and can often be found answering questions and sharing resources in our IRC channel.

Sumana Harihareswara is presenting a poster about her experiences at Hacker School and how that’s influenced her work as a community mentor. Sumana works for the Wikimedia Foundation as an engineering community manager, and she’s a dynamic, engaging speaker – her talk about open source at Wellesley College inspired a student to bring us to her campus.

Paul Tagliamonte is giving a talk on Hy, a Lisp front-end for Python. Paul has volunteered at several Open Source Comes to Campus events, and he’s the go-to person for newcomers interested in getting involved in OpenHatch-affiliated project OpenStates.  Fun fact: OpenStates, which Paul develops in his work at the Sunlight Foundation, got its start at a PyCon sprint in 2009.

Carol Willing is presenting a poster on Python music tools and their role in education. Carol is a software and hardware developer and mentor; she volunteered with OpenHatch at Grace Hopper Open Source Day, and she has made multiple documentation contributions to OpenHatch.

OpenHatch board member Jessica McKellar is giving multiple talks, including a keynote address, tutorials on getting started in open source and learning to program in Python, and a talk on building a Python sandbox. Jessica also deserves congratulations for her work as chair of PyCon’s diversity outreach, which has more than doubled the number of women speakers from last year.

OpenHatch’s lead designer, Karen Rustad, and OpenHatch co-founder, Asheesh Laroia, are teaming up for a talk on turning your computer into a server. Karen drew most of the graphics you see on the website, has committed code to the main web app, and is active on the OpenHatch board. Asheesh does code review, helps plan events, and is the President of our non-profit.

Catherine Devlin, Ned Batchelder and Naomi Ceder have all run or volunteered at OpenHatch-affiliated events – and they’re all giving talks at PyCon this year! Catherine’s talk on tools that blur the boundaries between code and documentation and Ned’s talk on writing Python tests look like great choices for attendees focused on usability. Naomi’s talk on her experience transitioning while staying involved in the Python community seems like a great choice for, well, everybody.

Congrats to Portia Burton, Nathan Yergler, and Marta Maria Casetti as well! Portia is giving a talk on making a predictive app using Scikit, while Nathan is giving a talk on Python debugging and Martia is presenting a poster on resources for learning Python. All three of them have contributed to OpenHatch through sprints, including last year’s PyCon sprint. We had so much fun with them, and others, that we’ll be sprinting again at PyCon 2014.

Volunteer event organizers and mentors Alex Gaynor, Emily Chen and Akkana Peck, who’ve shared their skills and wisdom with our students, will be spreading the knowledge at PyCon this year. Alex is giving a talk on understanding and implementing Pickle, a Python module for object serialization, while Emily is presenting a poster on using machine learning to analyze tweets about fashion brands, and Akkana is leading a tutorial on home automation. Board observer Selena Deckelmann is giving a talk on doing Python outreach to K-12 educators, while friend and contributor Christine Spang is giving a talk on wrapping C libraries for Python and a tutorial on information retrieval. Contributor Jean-François Fortin Tam is presenting a talk on PiTiVi, a video editor, while contributor Susan Tan is giving a talk on Python in the browser.

Jessica McKellar and Asheesh Laroia talk about community engagement at PyCon 2012.

What a great set of talks, tutorials, and posters! We’re looking forward to seeing as many of these as we can. If you can’t wait until PyCon to learn from these folks, try following them all on Twitter.

Did we miss anybody? Get any names, facts, or attributions wrong? Let us know and we’ll fix it.

These are just the people who have talks in the PyCon program.  There will be lots of other OpenHatch community members attending PyCon – including myself.  See you all in April!