OpenHatch newsletter, January 2014
Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 18.
OpenHatch at Grace Hopper Open Source Day:
Two events – one past, one future – have come out of Open Source Day. Sri Raga Velagapudi, our technical facilitator, invited us to Rutgers. Within two weeks we were able to pull togethera great event! We’ve also been in touch with Andrea Frost, Director of Leadership Development for Western Washington University’s Association for Women in Computing, who hopes to run an Open Source Comes to Campus event at her school sometime this year. Andrea emailed us soon after the event to say “thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through the tutorial. My classmate and I were attending our first open source event ever in our lives, and we were a bit intimidated at the beginning. It was great to meet your team and to have some fun in a group setting.” Needless to say, this is the kind of email that makes our work feel worthwhile.
Open Source Comes to Campus: notes and photos of events at University of Minnesota at Morris and Columbia.
We’re setting our Open Source Comes to Campus schedule for the winter/spring semester. Interested in volunteering for a local event or helping remotely? Have a potential sponsor? Get in touch.
On January 4, several contributors, including brand-new contributors, met up at a cafe in San Francisco to work on an OpenHatch website sprint! We used our own advice from the In-Person Event Handbook for organizing it. We reviewed a pile of pull requests, edited documentation, fixed some bugs, and ate tasty sandwiches – see Asheesh’s extensive notes on the mailing list.
Practical thread on OH-events list concerning how to approach disengaged attendees.
“I had a student stop by the office today and tell me that Saturday’s event was a real game changer for him.”
New projects in the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder
- python-requests, “an Apache2 Licensed HTTP library, written in Python, for human beings”.
- Retroshare, a “cross-platform, Friend-2-Friend and secure decentralised communication platform”.
OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web
Video of Linux.conf.us talks by Ashe Dryden (Programming Diversity) and Karen Sandler (Bringing More Women to Free and Open Source Software).
Planet Women in Free Software aggregate blog.
Leslie Hawthorn’s Nerd Story: What You Say to Young Girls Matters.
The third, and perhaps most important strength of Python is its user community. I’m sure this will be the most controversial part of this post, but I’ve found the Python community has bar-none the most supportive users. This is not by accident, but part of Python’s legacy and current commitment to inclusion. Python came from a teaching language background, and documentation was, and continues to be part of that legacy. Python is used as a teaching language in High Schools as well as MIT.
In addition, the Python Foundation focuses a lot of attention and energy into community diversity through its Diversity Statement, as well as commitment to bring women into the community, both through their own local communities (PyLadies) but also focusing on bringing that diversity into mainline events such as PyCon. The net effect is that Python is not only welcoming to women, but has a general welcoming atmosphere to people of virtually any background.
Also check out links submitted to /r/openhatch, and add your finds!
Get involved
You can help write this newsletter! The February newsletter in progress. Join our publicity list or hop on #openhatch with suggestions and questions.
Thanks to Britta Gustafson and Shauna Gordon-McKeon for contributing to this edition!