Madeleine Ball is an inspiration to anyone who thinks individuals should control the software and medical information that define our lives. I’m happy to honor her for this year’s Ada Lovelace Day, when we share the stories of women in science, technology, engineering, and math that inspire us.

Madeleine is a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University, working in George Church’s lab. As a Ph.D. student, she studied whole genomes to look for trait-causing genetic variants, and she continues this work as Director of Biology in the groundbreaking Personal Genome Project. All the while, she shares software under free software licenses and participates actively in Wikipedia.

I’ve had the chance to get to know her through friends that are part of the Boston FSF/OLPC free software scene. I also had the chance, in a car ride back from a political event, to hear her defend and explain Wikipedia to a scientist not very familiar with it. While I personally have only ever made small edits and contributed photos, she’s a scientist with years of experience editing the encyclopedia, creating new pages, making new diagrams as SVGs in Inkscape, reverting vandalism, and participating in community discussions around deletion. It was a pleasure to hear her perspective.

The Personal Genome Project (PGP), a focus of her current work, is an effort that helps researchers work with individuals who are willing to share their genome sequence to improve our understanding of genetics as a whole. While services like 23andme help people find out information about their genome, donating the genome to PGP enables all scientists to make use of the information. The data and code behind PGP is available under permissive, free software-compatible terms. This coming weekend, Madeleine is representing the Personal Genome Project at the upcoming Open Science Summit. To me, PGP’s emphasis on personal and community empowerment over health care through technology is reminiscent of Karen Sandler’s concern about proprietary heart implants.

As a programmer, Madeleine has contributed changes to GET-Evidence, a new, free software collaborative research web app. In her personal work, Madeleine has revived an unmaintained Python module for parsing genealogical data and co-created an interactive tool for browsing tree structures, for example the phylogenetic tree of life. Her free software background shines through in the most recent post on her blog, where she expresses concern about 23andme’s first patent. In 2008, Madeleine came up with the algorithm that selects articles for OLPC’s small Wikipedia snapshot, provided with every XO laptop.

Open this link and play the video to get a sense of how important that work is. If you’re impatient, jump to minute 4, where you see the Wikipedia activity in use in a classroom.

Madeleine’s work is an inspiration, and a reminder of how to apply free software principles in a new domain while staying true to software freedom. I had the chance to share the 2011 US Independence Day with her and a few others, so I’ll conclude with this photo from that event.

(Photo credits: Mad, on our apartment balcony and Fireworks by madprime.)

Welcome to the 3rd OpenHatch newsletter!

FLOSS Weekly interviewed Jessica McKellar about the Twisted project, and about welcoming newcomers and increasing diversity in open source projects. Co-host Dan Lynch asks specifically about OpenHatch at 28 minutes in. The whole show is excellent!

Fall 2012 Open Source Comes to Campus is underway

OpenHatch ran a workshop at Johns Hopkins University in mid-September. A full report is forthcoming on the blog.

We’re running a workshop at the Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois’ 18th annual computing conference on October 5-7, 2012.

Asheesh also delivered a talk at San Francisco State University, focusing on community communication skills.

Event wrapups

Daniel Choi, a member of the Events list, contributes an amazing analysis of bringing more women into the Boston Ruby community, full of data and anecdote!

Yours here!

Join the events mailing list to share your experiences and get help with making your events beginner-friendly.

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

Glyn Moody concludes in Learning from Diaspora (page 2):

The open source world does many things brilliantly, but one thing it does badly is planning for leadership succession. This was the case over a decade ago, when I explored the area in “Rebel Code”, my early history of the free software world. Worryingly, little has changed since then. Even the nurturing of new coders remains a very hit-and-miss affair – the only large-scale, organised attempt to bring new people into the world of open source is Google’s Summer of Code.


At the very least the current developments in the case of Diaspora are a reminder that free software is not doing enough to bring in new coding talent – especially women – or to think ahead in terms of passing on command. If these are not addressed, many other projects could be affected and afflicted with the kind of transition problems we are now seeing with Diaspora, especially as more of the key hackers pass into middle age and beyond, and begin to think about moving on.

Dave Neary on first contribution speed bumps:

I want to make clear – I am not picking on MediaWiki here. I rate the project well above average in the speed and friendliness with which I was helped at every turn. But they, like every project, have adopted tools to make it easier for regular contributors, and to help ensure that no patches get dropped on the floor because of poor processes. Here’s the $64,000 question: are the tools and processes which make it easier for regular contributors making it harder for first-time contributors?

Open hatch sank Port Authority’s $500G boat:

A $500,000 Port Authority patrol boat sank this month after a veteran police sergeant took the advice of a clueless civilian safety instructor — and opened a hatch while it was under water, The Post has learned.

Get involved

The OpenHatch wiki needs some love. Especially if you’re an experienced contributor to other wikis, be bold!

Read previous newsletters.

Like, follow @openhatch at identi.ca or Twitter.

(Photo credit: by Sameer Verma.)

On Monday, September 24, I had the chance to address Sameer Verma’s ISYS 573 class at San Francisco State University, a “Detailed study of the management of open source software and related processes.” We talked about mailing lists, IRC chat, bug trackers, netiquette, and how all that interacts in real open source projects like Debian.

The class, and open source at SFSU

The class is part of SFSU’s Information Systems program. The course is intended to be an exploration, primarily for business students, of licensing and business models available within open source. Professor Verma also explained to me that students appreciate the chance to use Linux during the course; he sets up an Ubuntu LTSP-based lab for it. As far as he knows, this is the only full-semester course anywhere that exposes business students to the world of open source. He has been teaching it since Fall 2005!

I was invited as a guest of Professor Verma through the Commons Initiative at San Francisco State. (I’m on its advisory board.) The Initiative is a cross-campus working group of activities that promote free, open source software and free cultural works. You can get a sense of the Drupal-, Wikipedia-, and OpenHatch-related events the Initiative has organized from its event calendar. SFSU also home to the most visible Software Freedom Day celebration in San Francisco, to my knowledge.

Catching up after the talk, he and I discussed the difficulties of promoting open source in a university IT environment defined by vendor relationships. I had to admit to him that I had my own experiences with those difficulties as an undergrad, dragging my heels against Johns Hopkins IT. Beyond that, Professor Verma’s ongoing efforts with One Laptop Per Child, his experience as an engineer, and his interest in activism and real-world change make for a very interesting person to catch up with!

My talk

The talk was a revised version of the one I gave at the JHU ACM as part of an Open Source Comes to Campus event. The idea of this talk is to explain in plain terms about how I personally first got involved in open source, show the audience how others do, and teach students basic online netiquette to help them participate actively in communities building software they care about.

One of the focuses of the talk is that contributing to open source goes beyond writing code and submitting patches. When I explained that free software contribution is anything that helps push a community forward to achieve its goals, even a mailing list post, I then asked if any of the students in attendance had done that. I was expecting a fair number of hands to be raised.

Instead, the room was silent. I kept going, and during the Q&A, I learned that at least one student had a problem with an open source add-on to NetBeans; he had discovered others the same problem discussing it on a web forum, but wasn’t sure how to proceed. I asked him if he had filed a bug, and I think I saw a lightbulb switch on. The key, I explained, is bringing up technical issues in the environment where the project maintainers will see it.

I tried to drive this point home by using the Debian OpenSSL key fiasco as a closing example. That story (if you don’t know it, read Russ Cox’s telling) is an amazing case of communication going almost right. In hindsight, my delivery of the example may have been a little too technical, but I believe most students got the drift.

Of the about 30 students in the class, most didn’t bring laptops. Luckily, Sameer’s good-natured encouragement helped get about 11 students onto IRC! Here’s what that looked like:

Resources for following up

Presentation resources:

• My slides: convenient web viewer, ODP, PDF
• My lecture notes
• Video of the talk (thanks to Sameer for the last-minute recording!)
• Russ Cox’s detailed discussion of the 2008 Debian+OpenSSL fiasco

Thanks to all who came, and to Professor Verma for inviting me!

by Daniel Choi, Braulio Carreno, Brendan Kemp, and Rebecca Nesson

On Friday and Saturday, August 17-18, a group of volunteers from the Boston Ruby community (RailsBridge Boston) ran a free two-day introductory Ruby and Rails workshop for women and their friends. Women were automatically allowed to apply for a spot, while men were allowed to apply if they knew a woman who was going to attend. Forty-four beginners, 36 of them women, attended the workshop at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A team of 17 experienced Ruby programmers assisted them through software installation, lectures and exercises. Students who had never written a line of code struggled for the first time with the command line, text editors, Git, the HTTP protocol, irb, and Heroku. By 4:30pm on Saturday, the students were tired from the exertion. But every student left the workshop with all the tools and concepts needed to write and deploy Rails applications.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 2nd OpenHatch newsletter!

We met our first fundraising goal as a non-profit organization! Thank you Google, Wikimedia, and an anonymous donor, who said:

Open source has opened doors for me continuously for more than a decade. With open source, I have touched the lives of millions. I believe and hope that helping OpenHatch will help to open similar doors for many others.

Congratulations to OpenHatch board member Jessica McKellar for being selected as a keynote speaker for PyCon 2013!

Fall 2012 Open Source Comes to Campus is ramping up!

We’re working with college computer clubs to make open source collaboration a part of students’ fall semester through a program called Open Source Comes to Campus. Our next event is in Baltimore, MD, the weekend of September 15.
We’re looking for more campuses, staffers, and sponsors for the fall 2012 series.

We’ve also been testing the curriculum, which resulted in a first patch by a new contributor to WordPress!

Code changes on the website

In this month, in the website and bug importers, we’ve:

• Fixed a couple of escaping-related bugs related to cross-site scripting, reported by a friendly (if mysterious) anonymous person.
• Improved documentation, with thanks to Jessica McKellar for reporting an issue, and
  Asheesh Laroia, Daniel Mizyrycki, and Adrian Ancona for writing more docs.
• At a sprint, Karen Rustad and Asheesh Laroia laid the groundwork for moving much OpenHatch JS code to the Backbone.js library, including adding the first RESTful API.
• Emilien Klein fixed a bug where editing one’s list of projects was not working (thanks to Sarah Sharp for reporting). This is Emilien’s first contribution; thank you!
• The bug importers gained a command line interface, which should make testing it much simpler.
• A special thanks to John Morrissey and Mark Holmquist for code review.

As you can see, there’s plenty of opportunity for frontend (JS/CSS/HTML) and backend (Python, scrapy, Django) coding in the OpenHatch web app. New people are always welcome!

Event wrapups

Jessica McKellar wrote up Boston Python’s first Intermediate Python Workshop. Read for lots of detail. One feedback quote to illustrate outcomes:

Thank you all so much for holding these workshops, more than anything I’ve tried they really motivate me to actually work on learning something new on my own time. Thank you thank you thank you!!

Karen Rustad spoke on “Learn to contribute to Open Source!” at SF PyLadies along with longtime Django committers Jeremy Dunck and Alex Gaynor (incidentally, Alex helped us organize an Open Source Comes to Campus event last year at his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic).

Asheesh and Karen presented Open Source Community Growth as a User Experience Problem at OSCON.

Join the events mailing list to share your experiences and get help with making your events beginnger-friendly.

Get involved

Back in June Adrian Ancona wrote a nice blog post about beginning to contribute to OpenHatch’s website code — a contribution which is now live.

Read the first newsletter.

Like, follow @openhatch at identi.ca or Twitter.

Last August Asheesh announced that OpenHatch would become a non-profit organization. Asheesh planned to be self-funded for 12 months. With the new OpenHatch board he set a goal to raise US$20,000 in 2012 in order to begin paying Asheesh a very modest amount to continue working full-time on OpenHatch. We’re very pleased that we’ve met this goal, thanks to Google’s Open Source Programs Office, Wikimedia Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

We’re really proud of and excited about all three. The best and most healthy donations come from organizations and individuals with a deep understanding of and commitment to a non-profit’s mission. As our home page says at the top, OpenHatch is “dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education.” Google’s Summer of Code is probably the most well-known initiative aligned with this mission. Cat Allman of the Open Source Programs Office at Google had this to say:

Google applauds the valuable work OpenHatch has done to help make it easier for people to get started contributing to open source software, and we’re pleased to be able to help them transition to their new format.

More people contribute to free knowledge via Wikipedia than any other project, and Wikimedia is working to increase the number and diversity of the already huge community around MediaWiki and other technical infrastructure; OpenHatch is thrilled to have helped run the pre-conference hackathon at Wikimania last month. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manger, wrote:

I’m excited that we’re working with OpenHatch on this. I’ve borrowed lessons from OpenHatch in structuring our events and educational materials. They are leaders in teaching new contributors, and in building open source communities’ capacity to nurture.

Our anonymous individual donor has this to say about why he supports OpenHatch:

Open source has opened doors for me continuously for more than a decade. With open source, I have touched the lives of millions. I believe and hope that helping OpenHatch will help to open similar doors for many others.

In the time since last August, we’ve been able to be very active. For example, OpenHatch has deployed new features to the web app and organized three Open Source Comes to Campus events and is organizing more for the fall, incorporated and applied for non-profit status, and inspired and helped tech groups to become more newcomer-friendly and gender diverse. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to stay in touch.

Won’t you join these pioneering supporters?

On Saturday, July 28th, the Boston Python user group ran its first Intermediate Python Workshop. The goals of this workshop were twofold:

1. Develop and playtest a bunch of novel projects with which intermediate Python programmers can practice their skills. This material would be available online under a permissive license for the whole Python community to reuse and remix.
2. Provide an opportunity for Boston Python Workshop alums and other beginner-to-intermediate programmers to practice together at their own pace with the support of experienced mentors.

This was the pitch for our 1-day event, which filled our 60 person capacity almost immediately and generated a 40 person waitlist:

Intermediate Python Workshop

Level up your Python through your choice of a dozen fun and practical projects.

We’ll provide the projects and friendly helpers; you bring a laptop and enthusiasm. You’ll rotate through the projects that interest you at your own pace, and we’ll have breaks for demos of awesome Python libraries and applications.

The Projects

Our material is all online. Please visit our wiki for a detailed event description and the full list of projects.

We’ll have 4 styles of projects for you at this event:

• Practice writing Python programs from scratch.
• Learn a Python library through a bitesized project.
• Work through an online tutorial.
• Learn intermediate CS concepts through an in-person interactive lecture.

Projects include:

• Building a web application with Django
• Interacting with a database in Python
• Data analysis and plotting with Matplotlib
• Using the Twitter API
• Regular expressions and cheating at Words with Friends
• Building a graphical game with Pygame

Prerequisites

This event is perfect for you if:

1. You know Python language basics, including dictionaries, lists, for loops, and writing functions
2. You are comfortable with looking up Python information when you need it (example: if you needed to learn about generating random numbers in Python, you’d be comfortable with Googling for and reading through the relevant documentation)

and at least one of the following is true:

1. You want to practice writing programs in Python from scratch
2. You want to learn about and practice more advanced Python/CS concepts, like classes and object-oriented programming
3. You want to learn about and practice using useful Python libraries, for example to talk to a database, make graphs, or create graphical games

If you are not sure if this event is appropriate for you, please check out the projects and get in touch with us!

Event schedule

• 10:30am – 12:00pm: Projects
• 12:00pm – 12:45pm: Lunch: meet fellow Pythonistas over pizza (sponsored by the Python Software Foundation!)
• 12:45pm – 1:00pm: Demos
• 1:00pm – 2:30pm: Projects
• 2:30pm – 2:45pm: Demos
• 2:45pm – 4:15pm: Projects
• 4:15pm – 4:30pm: Wrap-up

Content

All of our project content is online and ready for reuse under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Some of the projects additionally have source code on GitHub.

For this event, we created projects of several styles:

1. Write it from scratch

A common frustration we hear from learners at this level is that they can following along with tutorials, but when it comes to solving a problem from scratch and staring at a blank text editor, they don’t know where to start.

To help people get over this learning curve hump, we wrote projects that give you practice solving problems in Python from scratch. These projects guide you through breaking down the problem into steps and help you check your work along the way:

• Scrabble challenge: implement a scrabble solver that will tell you the best Scrabble words given a particular Scrabble rack (Great for cheating at Words with Friends!)
• Flash card challenge: implement a flash card quizzer from scratch.

2. Self-directed projects

We wrote the scaffolding for several projects to get you to the fun parts of practical Python applications quickly:

• Twitter: Use the Twitter API to write the basic parts of a Twitter client. See what your friends are tweeting, get trending topics, search tweets, and more.
• ColorWall: Program graphical effects for a pixel matrix.
• Databases and Jeopardy: learn how to get data from a database in Python while writing parts of a Jeopardy game, using real Jeopardy data!
• Plotting data with matplotlib: learn how to plot data with the matplotlib plotting library.
• Write a game with Pygame: Build a Snakes! clone using the Pygame graphical game development library.

3. Online tutorials

We’ve added some extra context, resources, and questions to check your understanding as you go through existing online tutorials:

• Make a website with Django: Work through the official Django tutorial, where you’ll create an interactive poll application.

4. In-person tutorials

Boston Python Workshop veteran Anna Callahan stepped up to lead a group through a 1.5 hour exploration of Python classes and objects:

• Object-oriented Python: Create a mini-banking system with users and accounts while learning the ins and outs of classes and objects in Python.

Feedback

Attendees filled out a short exit survey before leaving. Questions included how they’ve been learning and practicing Python, what they hope to do next with Python, and other topics they’d like to see turned into projects in this format.

There were a couple of recurring themes in the feedback:

• Knowing that you could get help in real time, in person, made learning more enjoyable and less intimidating.
• Attendees appreciated the ability to work at their own pace on their own interests.
• Attendees felt focused and motivated by being surrounded by people of a similar skill level who were also committed to spending the day practicing Python.

Some quotes:

Thank you all so much for holding these workshops, more than anything I’ve tried they really motivate me to actually work on learning something new on my own time. Thank you thank you thank you!!

You guys are awesome and make learning Python much less intimidating.

More projects

We asked attendees to list more topics they’d like to see at events like this. The responses included:

• scientific computing in Python
• web scraping
• GUIs
• writing tests
• packaging
• version control
• open source contribution
• more practice writing programs from scratch

Background material

Attendees came to this event with a wide range of backgrounds. The projects assumed general fluency in the Python ecosystem and a willingness to read up on anything you needed to learn along the way, which from the feedback and our observations during the event seems to have worked for most people. We did get requests for cheatsheets on concepts like:

• installing Python packages
• command line navigation

which are a great idea and something we’ll definitely implement for the next workshop.

If you’d like to help us develop material for future workshops, please get in touch!

Resources for beginner and intermediate programmers

We asked attendees to describe the material they’ve been using to learn and practice Python. The range of responses was impressive and introduced me to some resources I hadn’t heard about before. Responses included:

• Python questions on StackOverflow
• Dough Hellmann’s Python Module of the Week series
• Online learning initiative Coursera‘s Computer Science 101
• Online learning initiative Udacity‘s CS 253: Web Application Engineering
• Learning Python and Programming Python by Mark Lutz
• Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Allen Downey
• Dive Into Python by Mark Pilgrim
• The official python.org documentation
• The Quick Python Book by Daryl Harms and Kenneth McDonald
• Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw
• A Byte of Python by Swaroop C H
• The Python Osmosis podcast

Thank you to all of the volunteers who playtested the content and helped at the event. A big thank you to the Python Software Foundation for providing the pizza that kept these eager minds going! Boston Python is excited to run more Intermediate Python events and to continue experimenting with new content and event formats.

In August and September, students across North America are arriving on campus to their colleges and universities, starting classes, and picking up extracurricular projects.

We’re working with college computer clubs to make open source collaboration a part of students’ fall semester through a program called Open Source Comes to Campus, and we’re looking for campuses, staffers, and sponsors for the fall 2012 series.

We see introductory events as an opportunity for powerful outreach, explaining the ethics behind the movement and bringing greater diversity. For example, varying by event, 22-50% of our attendees have been women.

History and structure

Open Source Comes to Campus began in 2010 with the help of Yuvi Masory, Felice Ford, and a host of local volunteers at the University of Pennsylvania. In the time since, we’ve organized events at MIT, the University of Maryland at College Park, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

The event has three important components:

• Dedicated time to laptop setup, with instructions for Windows, GNU/Linux, and Macs (e.g., UMD event’s laptop setup)
• Teaching time, including sessions on the history and ethics of open source (AKA “free software”), and how open source communities are organized, both socially and technically (see our basic curriculum sketch)
• Hands-on project time, where active contributors and other helpers work with students to submit real patches to existing open source projects

Our goal is to have every attendee submit a change to an active open source community by the end of the workshop.

We also believe in reviewing and improving these events. For instance, when reviewing the event with only 22% attendance by women, we discovered that only 9% of computer science students at that institution are female; at least we beat the average. We believe that our newcomer-friendly event description and allying with women’s groups at colleges are the keys to our success on this metric so far. You can join the community of outreach event organizers and discussers on our Events mailing list.

This semester, we’re going to be experimenting with a few adjustments:

• We’ll add a live demonstration of submitting a patch to a project, and then watching a maintainer actually merge it in.
• At least some of our fall 2012 events will combine the teaching and projects into a single day, to minimize the time cost on our attendees.
• Where possible, we’ll be adding a “career panel” so students can listen to open source contributors discuss how open source has fit into their professional lives.

As usual, we’ll survey attendees afterward to find out how we can improve and what further help they need to get involved.

We need help

Students: Do you want to invite us to your college or university? We especially love to work with active computer clubs and diversity-oriented computing groups.

Open source contributors: Are you interested in acting as a teacher, a teaching assistant, or an ambassador for your project?

Prospective sponsors: As a non-profit, we’re also looking for financial assistance to make the events possible. Do you work for a company that could help fund these events?

Get in touch with us by emailing us:

hello@openhatch.org

Or, leave a comment!

A year ago the OpenHatch blog announced three big changes: transition to nonprofit status, outreach events, and Asheesh Laroia as full-time project lead. https://openhatch.org/blog/2011/openhatch-gains-full-time-project-lead-transitioning-into-a-non-profit/

Since then, Asheesh and a large number of OpenHatch contributors have been very busy. Browse or subscribe to http://openhatch.org/blog and http://identi.ca/openhatch or http://twitter.com/openhatch to see and keep up to date. Or, with a little more latency, read this newsletter (you’re reading the first issue now): mail [un]subscription at http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/announce or browse/subscribe to http://openhatch.org/blog/tag/newsletter

OpenHatch ideas spreading

“Jessica [McKellar] and Asheesh’s presentation changed our whole outlook on what is possible for the Boston Ruby community. In 40 minutes, they opened our eyes to how we were stunting ourselves as a community and excited us by laying out such a clear, practical, and feasible outreach strategy that we could follow to change things dramatically in a short period of time.”
–Daniel Choi of Boston Ruby
https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/the-steps-boston-ruby-is-taking-to-become-friendly-to-beginners/

Watch Jessica and Asheesh’s presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrITN6GZDu4 with further presentation background at https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/the-boston-python-workshop-at-pycon-2012/

Events

At PyCon 2012 (venue for above presentation) 10 people worked on OpenHatch tools https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/ten-contributors-hacked-oh-during-pycon-sprints/

OpenHatch again sprinted in May, also thanks to Python Software Foundation support https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/may-sprint/

Our most recent campus event was at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/openhatch-goes-to-rpi-concluding-our-spring-2012-university-tour/ with special thanks to the Rensselaer Center for Open Source, Kitware, and Nokia.

We’re currently scheduling 2012-2013 academic year campus events; see http://campus.openhatch.org/upcoming-events/ to have OpenHatch visit your campus!

July 10-11 OpenHatch helped run the two-day hackathon at Wikimania https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hackathon

Get involved

https://openhatch.org/wiki/Get_involved lists some ways to get directly involved in OpenHatch, from helping newcomers to working on OpenHatch tools to organizing an OpenHatch event to donating to support our work … https://openhatch.org/donate/ comes with the non-profit organization territory. You can also use https://openhatch.org/search/ to find volunteer opportunities with 309 different open source projects, including “bite-sized” bugs. Every form of involvement is deeply appreciated and welcomed.

Finally, thanks to rsync.net for an ongoing in-kind donation https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/thanking-rsync-net-for-donated-backup-space/

Hi! I’m Karen Rustad, long-time OpenHatch contributor and current board member. On Wednesday, I was part of a panel organized by PyLadies called, “Learn to contribute to Open Source“! Also, if you’re in the SF area this weekend, you should join me at the Django sprint co-hosted by PyLadies and the Django Meetup on Saturday! We’ll be primarily be focusing on improving the Django tutorial and docs, but feel free to work on anything Django there! Read the rest of this entry »