Still from User Liberation by Urchn / CC-BY-SA-4.0

Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 28.

OpenHatch didn’t run a campaign-style end-of-year fundraiser this year. Frankly, doing such a campaign excellently requires a huge amount of time from planning through fulfillment; bothering everyone with a campaign just didn’t pass cost/benefit. But we truly appreciate all our individual supporters and corporate sponsors (follow links to join them)! They allowed our one paid staffer (Shauna Gordon-McKeon, program director) to focus exclusively on organizing, improving, and organizing organizers for Open Source Comes to Campus events across the U.S. and Canada. We ran 26 Open Source Comes to Campus events this year, along with several in person sprints and IRC-based sprints, tutorials, and information sessions. OpenHatch was also present at many open source conferences, including SCaLE, LibrePlanet, PyCon, AdaCamp, Open Source Bridge, and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Look for a wrap up of last year coming soon, as well as news on how we plan to expand in 2015.

Meanwhile we want to highlight three end-of-year campaigns that ought to interest all readers of this newsletter.

First, a matching campaign led by Sumana Harihareswara to support the open source community in Portland, Oregon. That community is already a global leader in showing how open source can be welcoming, diverse…hospitable. Help it be even more of a guiding light. Sumana is NYC-based, so this is truly a strategic investment, not a ploy to get her local community funded. Read Sumana’s post on the OpenHatch blog for details (and note the match has been extended to December 31 at 1:30pm Pacific, which is 21:30 UTC, just a couple hours!).

Second, Software Freedom Conservancy has begun a supporting member program. Conservancy’s executive director, Karen Sandler, has long been a leader in making free and open source software more diverse; expect more of that next year. (Disclosure: your newsletter editor is a Conservancy director.)

Third, the Free Software Foundation is running its annual campaign. Notably they’ve just released a short video which takes its efforts to make the case that software freedom is crucial for everyone to the next level. We can imagine showing this at Open Source Comes to Campus events!

There are of course many other worthy year-end (and ongoing) charitable opportunities, but these are well aligned with the OpenHatch mission. And again, your direct support of OpenHatch is most appreciated. 🙂

Closing with a non-fundraising “inside OpenHatch” read: Your Django Story: Meet Susan Tan, interview with a core committer on the OpenHatch web application.

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

Mozilla Contribution Analysis current findings (slides): “How you respond to interest IS CRITICAL: response time is everything, suggesting work (help start up a ladder of participation) is very helpful“

Mako Hill, Ben Lewis, Frances Hocutt, Jonathan Morgan, Mika Matsuzaki and Tommy Guy ran their second set of Community Data Science Workshops at the University of Washington, to the delight of many.

Mozilla community builder and developer / OpenHatch volunteer Emma Irwin ran Hacking Open Source Participation, an online tutorial based off of Open Source Comes to Campus materials.

Also check out links submitted to /r/openhatch, and add your finds!

Get involved

You can help write this newsletter! The next edition in progress (preview). 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!

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