OpenHatch newsletter, November 2013
Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 16.
We’re soon to launch a fundraising campaign to support Open Source Comes to Campus through 2014. Take a peek! We’ll provide compelling stories and reasons during the campaign, but if you’re reading this newsletter you probably already “get it”. Donate early and often. 😉
Open Source Comes to Campus: Princeton was held November 24.
As part of our activites funded by a Python Software Foundation grant, Asheesh Laroia remotely coached Python Dominican Republic through holding its first project night (Spanish). Exciting to see this welcoming community building methodology spread!
We’ve been continuing our efforts to thoroughly document how we run our events. One part of that is creating screencasts of our curriculum. You can see our Open Source communications tools lecture, as well as a transcript, source slides, and walkthrough on the OpenHatch wiki. We welcome feedback!
A very practical thread on the OpenHatch events list: Strategies for getting information from venue hosts.
New projects in the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder
- Adaptive Image Deconvolution Algorithm (AIDA), a way to clean up photos, especially for scientific applications such as astronomy and microscope images.
- OpenSpending, which “aims to build and use open source tools and datasets to gather and analyse the financial transactions of governments around the world”, supported by the wonderful Open Knowledge Foundation.
- Stratagus, “a free cross-platform real-time strategy gaming engine”, with several games that run on this engine (and a long history!).
- Zero-K Multiplatform RTS, another real-time strategy gaming project, aiming to be “full of clever strategies and constantly moving combat with games lasting an average 20-30 minutes”.
OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web
David Revoy’s illustrated Building Krita for Cats is fun to look at, and a great example of the kind of friendly and leave-nothing-to-guessing documentation that helps newcomers be successful in making their first contribution. For context, Krita is an open source paint program, with an emphasis on artistic illustration, and Revoy was art director for Blender’s third open move, Sintel.
The Ada Initiative has a great interview with Karen Sandler on the impact of the Outreach Program for Women:
One of the things that I love about the program is that many of the women who come through it wind up being our best advocates. Some of our former participants have gone on to speak about the program at conferences and in their communities. Some other participants become mentors in future rounds. One participant now serves on GNOME’s board of directors and is our treasurer. So as the program progresses more people become active in shaping it. We’ve been growing it organically within GNOME infrastructure so as the program expands beyond GNOME it benefits from the influence of new mentors and advocates.
John Mark on the social responsibility of open source communities:
If we really want to rid the world or proprietary software, I don’t see how we can do that without adding in people who currently do not actively participate in open source communities.
…
This holiday season, let’s think about the social responsibility of open source communities and its participants. Let’s think about ways we can bring the under-represented into the fold.
The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth:
In 1960, 94 percent of doctors and lawyers were white men. By 2008, the fraction was just 62 percent. Similar changes in other highly-skilled occupations have occurred throughout the U.S. economy during the last fifty years. Given that innate talent for these professions is unlikely to differ across groups, the occupational distribution in 1960 suggests that a substantial pool of innately talented black men, black women, and white women were not pursuing their comparative advantage. This paper measures the macroeconomic consequences of the remarkable convergence in the occupational distribution between 1960 and 2008 through the prism of a Roy model. We find that 15 to 20 percent of growth in aggregate output per worker over this period may be explained by the improved allocation of talent.
Perhaps this gives an indication, purely in labor maket/productivity terms, of how huge the costs are of lack of diversity in IT, and its cutting edge, open source. In addition to primary concerns of fairness and justice.
Also check out links submitted to /r/openhatch, and add your finds!
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Thanks to Britta Gustafson and Shauna Gordon-McKeon for contributing to this edition!