Open Source Comes to Campus SUNY Stony Brook (album) BY-SA

Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 27.

12 upcoming Open Source Comes to Campus events in November:

• Hartnell College (Salinas, CA – near SF Bay) on Saturday, November 15th
• Indiana University at Bloomington on Saturday, November 15th (Event Website)
• Columbia University (NY, NY) on Saturday, November 15th
• Cornell University (Ithaca, NY) on Saturday, November 15th
• Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA – near Philadelphia) on Saturday, November 15th
• University of Washington (Seattle, CA) on Sunday, November 16th (Event Website)
• SUNY Stony Brook (Long Island, NY) on Sunday, November 16th
• Purdue University (Lafayette, IN) on Sunday, November 16th (Event Website)
• UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA) on Sunday, November 16th (Event Website)
• Baruch College CUNY (NY, NY) on Tuesday, November 18th
• Per Scholas (Bronx, NY) on Wednesday, November 19th
• Princeton University (Princeton, NJ) on Sunday, November 22nd

In-depth coverage of OpenHatch program director Shauna Gordon-McKeon’s talk at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: GHC ’14 – OpenHatch Open Source Workshop & Getting Into GitHub:

I was surprised that Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Program Director at OpenHatch, didn’t actually discuss the project much. Instead, she gave a quick, practical introduction to open source, which makes sense because the vast majority of GHC ’14 attendees aren’t active in open source communities. Yet.

OpenHatch is a non-profit that helps prospective open source contributors get up to speed on open source culture and find the right project fit. Her talk was a concise version of a bigger workshop OpenHatch offers, called Open Source Comes to Campus. If you or someone you know needs a 1-hour intro to open source, Shauna’s GHC ’14 slides are a good starting point.

Also, based on an interview with Shauna at GHC: How To Get Started In Open Source, Especially if you’re not a white male.

Emma Irwin and Errietta Kostala writeups of Open Source Comes to Campus (with Mozilla) University of Victoria.

Advice on proposing a PyCon poster session, and encouragement: Be a poster child!

Career advice from Sumana Harihareswara compiled on the OpenHatch wiki.

New projects in the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder

• Terminal Overload, “a home-made experimental free and open source multiplayer FPS game”.
• Phoenix, “an open source emulation frontend” for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

The grassy roots of growing developer skills with Growstuff.

OpenHatch board member Deb Nicholson reports in LWN.net on a talk about Metrics for free-software communities.

Women in Open Source Award sponsored by Red Hat, accepting nominations through November 21.

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

Get involved

You can help write this newsletter! The November 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!

Read previous newsletters.

Like +1, follow @openhatch at identi.ca or Twitter.

CC BY 2.0 by Taavi Burns

Would you like to present at an open source conference, but aren’t sure what to talk about, or feeling shy?  A poster can be a great way to get started.  Not only are they less nerve-wracking to present, they’re often more likely to be accepted than talk proposals.  Yesterday evening, October 1st, we held a meetup on our IRC channel to brainstorm poster ideas for PyCon 2015.

Here’s some of the advice that was shared.

From Jessica McKellar:

How to get your poster proposal accepted:

1. Pick a topic that plausibly appeals to at least 20% of attendees.
2. Write a thorough proposal, and include supporting information, convincing the interviewers that you will be a good presenter.
3. That’s it.

Posters are an opportunity to have a conversation around a topic.  So what are some topics you’d be excited to have conversations around — to get other people excited about?  Programming or diversity outreach you’ve done in your community, an experiment or study you ran, data that you analyzed, a set of tools for getting something done that you care about — whether or not you built it, choices when designing systems — a project you built and the way you broke it down and solved it, and how other people can do it too.

Diana Clarke covers the practical side:

You don’t need to have the actual poster ready until the conference.  (You do need to print it and bring it with you to PyCon. You can’t print it on site.)  All you need at this point is a topic, including a description of what you plan on covering.

And if your poster does get accepted, Karen Rustad has some practical advice:

Good posters are a conversation piece. At least one visual item of interest is helpful to that end. Charts, graphs, photographs of people… Even if your project is purely text-based software, find *something* big and graphical to put up!

You can read more about PyCon poster submissions here.  You can also look at accepted posters from previous years: 2014, 2013, 2012.

Sorry you missed the session? Let us know – if there’s enough interest we’ll host another one.

Deb Nicholson photo by Bryan Smith CC-BY-SA

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!

Read previous newsletters.

Like +1, follow @openhatch at identi.ca or Twitter.

CC-BY Britta Gustafson

Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 25.

We’re at conferences and preparing for northern fall semester Open Source Comes to Campus events! Longer newsletter in a month…until then, welcome newcomers on Software Freedom Day, September 20.

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

Gershom Bazerman Letter to a Young Haskell Enthusiast:

The most important thing, though not hardest, about teaching and spreading knowledge is to emphasize that this is for everyone. Nobody is too young, too inexperienced, too old, too set in their ways, too excitable, insufficiently mathematical, etc. Believe in everyone, attack nobody, even the trolliest. … The hardest thing, and the second most important, is to put aside your pride. If you want to teach people, you have to empathize with how they think, and also with how they feel.

Allison Kaptur on Getting Started With Python Internals, called “a textbook example of how to encourage people to dive into something exciting/scary” by Sumana Harihareswara.

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

Get involved

You can help write this newsletter! The September newsletter in progress (preview). Join our publicity list or hop on #openhatch with suggestions and questions.

Read previous newsletters.

Like +1, follow @openhatch at identi.ca or Twitter.

Software Freedom Day

Software Freedom Day is an annual celebration of free software held in hundreds of locations around the world.  This year, Software Freedom Day is Saturday, September 20th. Find a location near you, or start your own event!

But why just attend, when you can present?

I’ll be leading a 90 minute introduction and workshop for newcomers to free software at Boston’s Software Freedom Day.  I haven’t decided yet what exactly to present, but I know I’ll be using some combination of our Open Source Comes to Campus activities.  Take a look through our curriculum here and think about whether you’d like to participate in Software Freedom Day by giving a newcomer-friendly presentation, workshop or tutorial.  You can teach people how to pick a project, use IRC or issue trackers, help make projects more accessible to people with disabilities, combat impostor syndrome and more!

Feel free to email us at hello@openhatch.org or stop by our IRC channel (#openhatch on Freenode) to discuss.

An open hatch in the museum submarine at OMSI in Portland, CC-BY Britta Gustafson

Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 24.

WIRED reports on Open Source Comes to Campus: The Crusade to Bring More Women to Open Source.

Shauna Gordon-McKeon on Deconstructing Contributions at Open Source Bridge.

Mako Hill’s write up of the community data science workshops.

Shauna Gordon-McKeon participated on a video panel about how to get involved in open source.

Our FOSS Opportunities page is a large and growing list of financially supported opportunities (usually internships) for people (usually students) to work on free/open source projects.

Open Source Comes to Campus planning

The Open Source Comes to Campus fall schedule is being finalized, with over a dozen events set to run at schools from New York to San Francisco, from Morris, Minnesota to Lewisburg, PA. Interested in organizing, volunteering at, or attending an event? Email us!

The planning mailing list has active discussions led by Shauna about improving the curriculum and following up with attendees. Helpful feedback is welcome, especially if you also have experience running outreach workshops. Recent threads include:

• How to better frame tutorials (scaffolding with a good default pathway!)
• Getting more of our curriculum online to better support both attendees and self-guided learners.
• Figuring out effective ways to offer ongoing mentorship after events (including the benefits of mentorship, concrete tasks that can give students quick successes, mentorship styles, and the advantages of pairing as a form of mentoring).

New projects in the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder

• Miam-Player, a nice music player. It’s for Windows, Linux, and OS X, written in C++ with Qt.

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

Writeup of Geek Feminism’s path to a code of conduct.

Python is now the most popular introductory language at top US universities.

Amanda Menking asks how can a community that values transparency create safe spaces?

Designing for Participation: “created in order to get Mozilla community members to think about how they can structure the work Mozilla does to better enable contributions from anywhere.”

Andy R. Terrel on SciPy2014: “Sheila Miguez pointed out the incredible in-person event handbook from Shauna G. of Open Hatch. I think taking up the principles in this handbook is really needed. We have not made welcoming, goal setting, and clarifying structures a priority at events.”

Article series edited by Jen Wike on young professionals and open source.

Free eDX course, Introduction to Linux “for experienced computer users who have limited or no previous exposure to Linux”.

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

Get involved

You can help write this newsletter! The August 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!

Read previous newsletters.

Like +1, follow @openhatch at identi.ca or Twitter.

OpenHatch community at Open Source Bridge

Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 23.

OpenHatch had a strong presence at AdaCamp Portland and Open Source Bridge this month. OpenHatch community members Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Britta Gustafson, Sumana Harihareswara (twice!), and Jen Davidson all presented. We also had an OpenHatch dinner at a nearby tea house — picture above, apologies to those who left before we remembered to snap a picture!

Report on teaching open source at UC Davis and Heidi Ellis on Open Source Comes to Campus UMass Amherst and other open source outreach events.

Interested in running an Open Source Comes to Campus event at your school this fall? Contact us! We’re currently planning our fall schedule.

Shauna and Britta talked about OpenHatch on In Beta, a podcast about tech culture and open source.

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

Gail Carmichael writes how Python and Pi Helped Make Go Code Girl 2014 A Great Success.

Introductory edit-a-thons how-to. Similar to an Open Source Comes to Campus event, but introducing newcomers to contributing to Wikipedia rather than open source projects. Upcoming following this model: WikiProject Open Barn Raising 2014.

Karen Sandler on what we mean by “we”.

Rachit Gupta uses curated newcomer-appropriate bugs to go from
From Zero Knowledge About Open Source to GSoC.

Google launches “Made with Code, an initiative to inspire girls to code.”

You’re Welcome: A Pattern Language for Inclusive Events, free book in progress by Alex Bayley, to provide “over a hundred practical steps you can take to make your community events more inclusive, welcoming, and rewarding.”

Interactive semi-automated package review (by abusing Travis-CI) — to improve mentorship, by Asheesh Laroia.

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

Get involved

You can help write this newsletter! The July 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!

Read previous newsletters.

Like +1, follow @openhatch at identi.ca or Twitter.

On Saturday, May 10th, we held our twenty-seventh Open Source Comes to Campus event at the University of California-Davis.  The event was organized by the Davis Computer Science Club and sponsored by Rackspace.  Many thanks to our amazing mentors: Thomas Kluyver, Britta Gustafson, Charlyn Gonda, Conrad Fay, Kevin Liu, Michael Seydel, Jackie Zhang, Timothy Tong, Alex Mandel, Mike Covington and Asheesh Laroia.

At the event, we used the Software Carpentry sticky-note method for gathering feedback.  We asked students to tell us one thing they learned and/or enjoyed, and one thing we could improve on.

What Students Learned

Many students talked about the open source tools they used at the workshop:

* How to use git; Install IRC; Learn some commands
* GitHub. How to pick a project.
* Learned more git!
* I learned how to use IRC chat.
* I learned that you can tag git commits and use them to reference commits.
* IRC. Never used it before, and it looks like there are awesome channels for webdev.
* I learned about git revert, and how totally kick ass it is.
* I learned how to use git better.
* Learned how to navigate git.
* What branching in git actually is.
* How to collaborate using git.
* Git.
* How to use git; how open source software works.
* I learned how to set up git, and get little familiar of open source project.
* Git commands.
* Awesome way of interacting with tools while listening to lecture.

A couple of students mentioned types of open source projects they were excited to learn about:

* Open source possibilities for designers.
* Open source can be used for good (humanitarian projects)!

* Learned: how to get involved with open source projects by Googling information about the project and lurking the repository for information.
* How to properly find open source projects.
* I learned how to find projects to work on.
* I learned a process to start on open source projects.
* How easy it is to search for projects and find important contacts.
* Learned how to gain credibility.
* Learned how to gain exposure in open source projects.
* Found some cool open source projects that relate to my interests.
* I get to know more about open source projects! Found some cool projects and want to try to explore them. 🙂 Thank you!

* How many open source projects are out there.
* How open source projects work.
* Open source is actually a big thing.
* Open source/free software doesn’t necessarily mean free as in $0.00, but it means that the source code is freely available to the public & changes can be made.

Things To Improve

Some students felt that the event didn’t challenge them or teach them anything new:

* I only learned about the /me command in IRC. Too easy. 🙁
* Too easy. 🙁 Since this was tailored to CS students, the materials should be a little more intermediate.

While another would have liked more preparation:

* Learning the basics of git beforehand!

A couple students asked for more examples and demos:

* run through an example open source project we edit.
* Thanks for holding this workshop. If you could have a project demonstration set up and we can see how it is edited, that would be great.

Some students wanted more explanation for why open source is relevant:

* Maybe explain how this is important in today’s world. Make this event accessible to everyone on campus.

* Question: How has open source been profitable to developers when people are able to download it?

* Maybe give some extra info about why open source is good, why we should open source code.

And there were some logistical issues, which we’ll keep an eye out for next time:

* Sound system for louder speaker.
* Have donuts and coffee at the time mentioned.
* Organization of the event should be better. We had no schedule. We did not know what to expect, when the breaks are, are there breaks? Lunch at 1 pm is too late.

Finally, some folks had suggestions for improving the curriculum:

* Want to learn about how people contribute to Python.
* Workflow to using git and GitHub
* Like to learn more about popular tools.
* Suggestion: during the git portion, explain what each command is for more thoroughly.
* OpenHatch: who are you? You never explained! How to get involved in projects other than finding bugs? What was the point of git exercise? It did not make sense. Also without looking at the hint, it was not clear at all.

We highly recommend the sticky note method!  We’ve had very little luck getting students to fill out exit surveys.  Writing some short, anonymous notes seems like a much better way of learning how your event went and what you can do better.  Thanks, Davis attendees!

Open Source Comes to Campus @ Hartnell + laptop setup

Welcome to OpenHatch newsletter number 22.

Open Source Comes to Campus held events at Hartnell College and UC Davis. Pictures are up (Hartnell, Davis) with blog posts coming soon.

Reports on Open Source Comes to Campus events at Princeton and SUNY Stony Brook.

This summer, OpenHatch has a Google Summer of Code student and project! Elana Hashman is working on a bug set creator to help event and sprint organizers collect and annotate lists of bugs for their event participants to work on. To learn more about the project, you can visit its blog, and subscribe to the feed for project updates throughout the summer.

New projects in the OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder

• xoreos, “A reimplementation of BioWare’s Aurora engine (and derivatives)”.

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

Christie Koehler is creating an open planning checklist “to help those leading projects have an open planning processes in order to enable community participation” and wants your feedback.

Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson writes Women Have a Long Way to Go in Open Source.

The last two session of the Community Data Science Workshops at UW happened in May, with the help of OpenHatch community members Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Asheesh Laroia, and Elana Hashman.

The Strange Loop conference is doubling down on diversity.

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

Get involved

You can help write this newsletter! The June 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!

Read previous newsletters.

Like +1, follow @openhatch at identi.ca or Twitter.

I spent weeks going back and forth with Hanne Paine, a student and open source enthusiast at SUNY Stony Brook. For every date she suggested, we already had an event planned. Finally, we decided to wait until the fall to hold a full workshop.  I felt badly, though. I knew I’d be passing through New York City in April, right around the dates she’d been pushing for. “How about I just stop by for a couple hours on a week night and do a short intro presentation?”

It was a low muss, low fuss affair. Hanne arranged for a room and some pizza. I asked OpenHatch volunteer and Wikimedian Sumana Harihareswara to attend the event with me, and we figured out the curriculum on the train ride over. Hanne greeted us when we got to campus about ten minutes before the event was scheduled to start. “How’s it looking?” we asked.

Hanne smiled. “We have over 90 sign ups.”

Of the 90 signups, 75+ attended. This was more than we had seats for, and many students ended up sitting in the aisles and on the floor in the front of the room.  It was also a 40 to 1 student to mentor ratio – by far the highest we’ve ever had.

I wasn’t worried. We’ve designed the OpenHatch curriculum to work well with any size group. Many of the small group activities can easily be turned into pair programming (or pair brainstorming, or pair researching) exercises. I presented our “Intro to Free and Open Source Software” and our “Communications Tools” activities to students, who worked together and helped each other. Thanks to the Software Carpentry sticky-note method, Sumana and I were able to more easily find students who were really stuck.

After the communications tools activities, Sumana presented on learning styles. Drawing on the work of Mel Chua, she talked about the different ways that people learn and how certain kinds of learners might have special difficulty contributing to open source. Both Sumana and I have seen many a newcomer to open source assume that it’s their fault they’re not able to complete a task or understand a concept. Sumana discussed ways to overcome these issues, and the need for a diversity of learners in open source.

The final element of the evening was a career panel, where students asked question of Sumana, Red Hat’s Marina Zhurakhinskaya, and Mozilla’s Gregg Lind. Due to technical difficulties, it ended up being an IRC-based chat instead of a video discussion. Students asked a variety of questions, both expected (“How do you get paid?”) and unexpected (“How does open licensing work?”).

Takeaways

• It’s not clear whether SUNY Stony Brook is an unusually great place for open source outreach, or if the nature of the shorter event attracted more people. Regardless, it was definitely the most impact we’ve had for the least amount of effort. We’re hoping to use this model for schools that can’t support a longer workshop, or as a “teaser” for communities that are not yet ready for a full Open Source Comes to Campus event.
• Although these events can run with a small number of volunteers, it’s clear that those volunteers need to be trained and prepared. If you’re interested in leading a short event at a college – or other community group – near you, please contact us, and we’ll give you the support and training you’ll need to pull this off.
• The difficulty scheduling a weekend event at Stony Brook has also pushed us to try running simultaneous events. This has by and large been successful, and something we’re planning to adopt going forward. More in a later post!

Thanks to Hanne Paine for organizing this event, to Sumana Harihareswara for helping present, and to Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Gregg Lind for joining us on the career panel. We can’t wait to return to Stony Brook in the fall!