OpenHatch newsletter, July 2013
Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 12.
Thoughts after our Open Source comes to City College of San Francisco event: Making Open Source Comes to Campus even more hands-on.
Asheesh Laroia will give a talk at Debconf on How other FLOSS communities mentor and what it means for Debian as part of the community outreach track. You can also check out the slides from Asheesh’s OSCON talks, one on scrapy and another entitled Quantitative Community Management.
At OSCON, Britta Gustafson joined the team of people answering emails to hello@openhatch.org, and independently, Courtney Thurston submitted her first pull request (which was merged and deployed). Welcome to both of them!
Through Google Summer of Code, Tarashish Mistra is working on making the training missions easier to edit on the web. You can track his progress on his GSoC blog. David Lu also joins us this summer to create new mentor-mentee tracking tools. You can read more on the Greenhouse project website and his GSoC blog.
You can help write this newsletter (see “Get Involved” below). Or if submitting links is your thing, submit away at /r/OpenHatch.
OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web
GUADEC 2013, August 1-4 in Brno, includes five sessions directly concerning outreach and welcoming newcomers.
Akademy 2013 happened earlier this month and featured a talk on welcoming newcomers in India and lightning talks by participants in summer programs, including the Outreach Program for Women.
Outreach Program for Women has a new site. The program has 37 participants this northern summer.
John Riedl died of cancer recently. The Wikimedia blog has a remembrance that includes links to his research on diversity and open collaboration.
Fiona Cullinan writes up a negative result in Female programming dream that’s gone off the Rails:
If I learned anything that day it’s the truth of ‘those who can do, can’t necessarily teach’ and the expectation the event engendered of beginners being able to code in a day left me feeling bruised. I came out upset and unsure of whether to continue – which is the very opposite of the outcomes those running the event were trying to achieve.
(Folks who can do, and want to teach beginners, join the OpenHatch events list and we can help each other avoid common pitfalls and improve together when they occur.)
If contributing to a project for a first-time contributor to open source is difficult, it’ll often also be difficult for a long-time contributor to open source but first-time contributor to the project. Karl Fogel writes about a technial barrier to first-time contribution that deterred him years ago, and joy at seeing a project fix that: Credit where credit is due: LibreOffice is now ridiculously easy to build.
Documentation is another great way to make free software better; to get intensively involved, check out the 2013 Doc Camp Call for Proposals.
Get involved
You can help write this newsletter! The August newsletter will be edited at htmlpad may be previewed there as well. Join our publicity list or hop on #openhatch with suggestions and questions.