OpenHatch newsletter, September 2014
Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 26.
It’s Open Source Comes to Campus season again! In September we held our third event at CCSF and our second at the University of Minnesota, Morris. You can read write-ups from mentors Jim Hall and Noah Keitel.
In October, we’ll be running events at DePaul University in Chicago, Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Victoria. Let us know if you’d like to mentor!
Interesting recent conversations on OSCTC-planning:
- What can we do with event signup pages after events are over? – finding ways to make these pages more useful (“It marks the event as (1) having happened in the past, and (2) having evidence of positive impact, both of which are useful — as opposed to having many unmaintained, minimally-varying forks of the same workshop materials/text/schedule over and over”).
- What are the goals for our events, and how can we help enthusiastic project maintainers collaborate with us to support these goals? – a detailed and important exploration by Shauna.
- An idea for an alternative event framework!
Attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing? Come see Shauna speak at Open Source Day. Also keep an eye out for the open source table topic, which will hopefully be announced soon.
Become an Open-source Contributor Video Conference, a panel for women interested in open source in Israel, featuring remote participant Shauna Gordon-McKeon of OpenHatch.
Outreach Program for Women IRC meetings, again featuring Shauna on behalf of OpenHatch.
OpenHatch board member Deb Nicholson received the O’Reilly Open Source Award (photo above).
New projects in the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder
- khmer is “a library and suite of command line tools for working with DNA sequence” – see the homepage for more explanation, and check out the getting started page (including a list of low-hanging-fruit issues).
- Movie Info takes a list of movies and “generates a nice looking webpage which includes a sortable table containing each movie’s title, cover image, etc.” The author says “it still requires a lot of improvement and would be perfect for someone starting out their ‘open-source career’ to get involved with.”
- Multiverse Miner is a “sci-fi, incremental RPG” under active development for a new version. It encourages people interested in contributing all kinds of skills (including general feedback and testing) to join its chat channel and start participating.
- Sanickiosk is “a free, turn-key web kiosk designed for public libraries, city government, health clinics, and other institutions in need of public information stations”. It would like help with publicity and other tasks.
- sota is “a new dynamic programming language borrowing from python, yaml, bash, ruby f#, perl and c|c#”. It would like contributors of all kinds who might be interested in helping with a programming language in an early stage, including contributing to development and publicity.
- Xfce is “a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.” It would like help with translation, documentation, testing, and bug triaging as well as development – see its contribution start page.
OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web
Meg Ford on Lessons from the Women’s Resume Writing Workshop at LinuxCon.
Open Science Codefest “is participant-driven, and our process will be guided by the Open Source Project Guide: Hackathon/Sprint version.”
Julia Evans on her Strange Loop talk You can be a kernel hacker! and inclusiveness at that conference.
Benjamin Mako Hill’s Community Data Science Workshops Post-Mortem.
Lukas Blakk on improving visual cues for users New to Bugzilla.
Matt Micene on looking for the right open source project to contribute to: “After you do some initial research on the types of ways you can contribute to open source projects of all kind, take time to evalute what projects might be potential good fits for you. A great resource for this is OpenHatch—like a matchmaking service for your skills and goals.”
Also check out links submitted to /r/openhatch, and add your finds!
Get involved
You can help write this newsletter! The October newsletter 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!