Dear blog readers,

I’m besmirked to announce that our team of crazed contributors has created OpenHatch version 0.11.03.

It wasn’t as big a release as in some past months, and so I wrote about how we’re going to improve that in my email to the Devel list (quoted below). The highlights of the release include:

• New contributors to the code: Paul Bakulich, Joel Rivera, and Jairo Lopez
• Karen redesigned the front page for when you aren’t logged in
• Asheesh (whose words you’re reading right now) spent a bunch of time fixing the buildout process so that it reliably finishes.
• Jack Grigg (pythonian4000) worked furiously on improving the code quality of the code that downloads bugs from bug trackers and populates the volunteer opportunity finder.
• We have a plan for giving more people (other than just Asheesh) access to the main OpenHatch server.

Here are the lovely names and faces of people who committed to git or filed bugs that were closed in 0.11.03:

Work on the 0.11.04 release (due on April 30) is already underway. You can see what we’re planning by looking at the tickets in the milestone. We need more contributors — and this time, we picked tickets for the release that make it easy for people to jump in and make a difference.

Below is what I wrote to Devel:

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We’re running an event next week: it’s a week-long involvement campaign to help users of free software desktop applications get in touch with the development process.

If you’re a contributor to a free software desktop app, and you want to grow your community, we want you to help you. We have some experience running outreach events, and you have experience building your app, so here’s the plan: email us, and together we will find a time next week for you to show prospective contributors how to build your app in event on your project’s IRC channel. We’ll work with you to help it succeed.

This event is focused on desktop software. Those programs often have many thousands of users, most of whom install the software from packages and never experienced the process of building it themselves.

There are only four spaces left, so email quickly! Sign up for our “Build it” week by following the instructions at https://openhatch.org/wiki/Build_it.

More information

(This is a cross-post of my personal blog post announcing the event.)

You’ll see it in virtually every free software project: lots of users would love to get involved with contributing to the project, yet they haven’t for one reason or another. It definitely isn’t due to a lack of demand for help. One such barrier is that many people simply haven’t gotten through the first step of compiling the program. That’s not to say there aren’t other places where new contributors get stuck, just one that’s significant enough to require attention and provide an opportunity to bring new people into the community.

So as part of OpenHatch, I’m helping an event: five sessions to help free software projects teach potential/wannabe contributors how to compile the app and turn them into community members who feel comfortable following discussion on the project’s development lists. Soon-to-be contributors can have a dedicated time to be walked through the compile process and engage with members of the development community. Simple, but very useful!

Over one week, the target is to have five projects email their mailing lists to announce that experienced people will be on their IRC channel at a particular time, waiting to help you compile the app. If you are a member of the development team for a free software desktop app and you want more prospective contributors to join in, please email us and pick a day and time for you and others to be helping people in your project’s IRC chat room.

Sound interesting? Here’s what you do:

If you’re a free software contributor and know how to compile a program you work on, we want you to run this event within your project.

Email starling@openhatch.org with one sentence or shorter answers to each of these questions:

• Your project’s name
• What you like about this outreach event
• How you heard about the “Build it” week

Remember that space is limited, and we’ll get back to you to let you know if there are still slots available. We’re particularly looking for projects with plenty of users, which means a healthy pool of people to draw from.

If you want to read more, check out our wiki page about the event: http://openhatch.org/wiki/Build_it

If you want to chat, I’m reachable as dpic@identi.ca for StatusNet and as sarvodaya in #openhatch on irc.freenode.net. Asheesh (paulproteus on IRC) is also helping organize.

Once a month, we breathlessly tell you that the site is updated to the latest release. This is that time! We’re pretty excited about the 0.11.02 release; we focused on improving the experience for people trying to grow their projects.

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We are very proud to announce that OpenHatch has been updated to version 0.11.01!

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Happy new year, everyone! This is Karen Rustad, OpenHatch’s former scribblemonkey and present grad student and aspiring coder.

OpenHatch’s new mission statement essentially states that the point of OpenHatch is to lower barriers to entry for new contributors to open source software (whether it’s their first or their tenth FLOSS project). Prospective contributors have to overcome confusing jargon, a fear that their effort might not be welcome, and/or a lack of personal connection to the free software community. Each of the tools OpenHatch has developed — the volunteer opportunity finder, the people and project pages, the automated skillbuilding ‘missions’, and so forth — has been meant to address one or more of those obstacles.

To continue in this vein, this semester, Asheesh and I are planning on building a new tool for OpenHatch users specifically to assist new technical contributers. We’ve dubbed it the ‘buildhelper’.

A mockup drawing:

(I already have some better ideas for the icons, but they’ll have to wait until I return home to my drawing tablet and Photoshop-running computer.)

The buildhelper is a templating system for projects to list out on an OpenHatch page all of the steps necessary for a new contributor to get a working development environment for that project running on their machine. The steps should cover checking out the project’s code, installing dependencies, running the development server (or analogous, depending on the type of project)–everything necessary for a completely new developer to be ready to test code and start writing patches for bugs. It’s a form of documentation, only targeted at editors of your project rather than users.

Each step has the basic name/description of a step, a more detailed explanation (if necessary), a link (if necessary, e.g. to the relevant git repository), an estimate of how long the step should take, a help button that links to either a relevant OpenHatch mission or other background-info tutorial that a project favors (optional), and a “crap, it didn’t work and I don’t understand why” button that takes the user to the project’s IRC channel (the dev channel specifically, if the project has more than one), where they can solicit help from more experienced project volunteers and point to the specific step where things went wrong. As a user completes each step, they can check them off one by one; if necessary, they can leave and come back to the buildhelper steps later and it will still remember their progress. Once the user gets to the end, we then congratulate them (yay!) and link them to the project’s list of bitesize/good-for-newcomers bugs so they can get started hacking right away.

It should be extremely obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: the buildhelper can’t do all the work involved with getting new developers up and running. In order to be useful, projects will need to put in a great deal of effort: filling out the templates with accurate, precisely-worded instructions; accounting for different operating systems or other environmental quirks; and making sure that when unsuccessful wannabe-contributors stumble into their project’s IRC channel, there are helpful humans to answer their questions. Additionally, this tool doesn’t cover things like code style guides, patch submission guidelines, or other information new devs are likely to need (though providing a space to link such resources at the end of the buildhelper might be a good idea!). Free software development is fundamentally a human-based, community-oriented activity, as much as we sometimes might like to pretend it isn’t. 🙂 There’s just no getting around that. But by building a clear, explicit place for prospective developers to seek out this kind of assistance and providing suggestions and specifications for current project maintainers on how to fill out the buildhelper template in a helpful, useful way, we hope that this tool will make communication between fresh recruits and old hands much easier.

The current plan (after some preliminary HTML mockups and background Django coding) is first to make a buildhelper document for getting started on contributing to OpenHatch (eating your own dog food–fun and expedient!) before working with other projects and (eventually) making an interface for filling out and submitting the buildhelper template open to all FLOSS. This will take months, at least, though mainly because I’m in school full-time. But hopefully it’ll be worth the effort in the end.

Anyway, we would love some feedback on the buildhelper as an idea. Could you see such a tool as being something useful for your project, that you could point new contributors to? What features would you like to see? What are some of the common stumbling blocks you’ve encountered when you (or people you know) have tried to get involved with a new project for the first time? Were there assumptions made by projects (or individual volunteers) that made getting started harder, or particular communication problems? Or are Asheesh and I completely nuts for wanting to build this? Let us know!

We’re now running OpenHatch version 0.10.11!

It took a lot of people to get here:

The release is named for November 2010, the month that we planned out what we wanted to do. (The release has nothing to do with Soviet submarines.)

I thought you all might like to know a bit about the latest changes. These are most important things we accomplished this release:

• We had a release! This is the first time we’ve done that. We hope to do them monthly. We also have had planning meetings weekly. Jack added milestone support to our Roundup instance to make that happen.
• At the start of the release process, we labeled some bugs as “Critical”, and we fixed them all.
• TravisB led the writing of a privacy policy.
• Jack Grigg re-organized the training missions’ source code; now each mission lives in its own directory, which we hope will make it easier to add new missions.
• I made the Subversion mission guide you through its steps in the required order. (Thanks to Luke Faraone for his amusing demonstration of the need for this.)
• Jessica McKellar heroically debugged a problem where a user’s profile image crashed the Python Imaging Library.
• Jessica McKellar fixed the profile display and project answers page so that they format newlines.
• We started publishing nightly snapshots of our database. Karen built the first version of this.

If you go to the OpenHatch site, you’re interacting with version 0.10.11. For more information…

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I’m writing this post to tell you all two things:

• We have this cool email list called Devel, where we plan and talk about coding and graphics and design and infrastructure and the other stuff that makes the OpenHatch website go.
• I went to a summit and and Jefro made a nice video of me explaining OpenHatch, the best one yet.

I would really like it if more blog readers joined the Devel list. I have a hunch that there are a bunch of nice people who see these web updates, and who would contribute to the conversation by email, but who aren’t on the list yet. That might be you!

So if you join the list, I’ll send you a hand-written “thank you” note. More after the jump…
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The OpenHatch project has an ongoing commitment to transparency and hackability. From the first day the website was live, you have been able to get the source code. Now, thanks to Karen Rustad‘s work, you can download snapshots of the OpenHatch database (except some private user data).

This goes beyond our obligations under the Affero GPL. Read on for why the data matters.
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Dear readers! We went to the University of Pennsylvania a few weekends ago. I snapped some photos of our students and teachers.

We ran a two-day open source immersion experience, with the first day focused on learning. If you want to learn more, check out the website announcing the event and our follow-up page.