We recently ran into some issues where the site went down for a lack of disk space. To fix that, I’ll take the site offline and give it access to more storage. The outage will include mailing lists. Any email messages sent during that period will be picked up when the server comes back online.

I expect it to take about 15 minutes, but it might take up to twice that long, so expect the site to be offline from 5 PM Eastern until 5:30 PM Eastern.

Photo: Lets Grow Together by Kulveer Virk

Hi blog readers! We try to keep you folks briefed on the latest news with OpenHatch.

This time, Mike, Deb, Jessica, Karen, and I are doing something special: asking you to donate to the OpenHatch Foundation.

Karen has designed our new T-shirt, a special gift for donors who give $100 or more before the year’s end.

And I wanted to give you a summary of what we’ve accomplished so far in 2012.

(If you already know you want to donate, you can jump straight to it!)

• 2,358 people have entered at least one valid answer into our training missions, learning at their own pace how to get involved in free, open source software. That’s more than 1,000 new people in the past 10 months.
• About 120 students attended our 4 workshops and 1 lecture at colleges, as part of Open Source Comes to Campus, learning the basics of open source contribution and trying it hands-on. We plan to double that next year, including a special focus on women in CS groups.
• 2,199 bitesize bugs are listed in our volunteer opportunity finder.
• Over 80 people signed in with our newcomers corner at the Wikimania Hackathon and at the Pandas sprint we co-organized.
• 41 unique people have made commits to our web app code this year.
• 4 awesome fellow board members hired our first full-time executive director in July. (That’s me!)
• 1 year is how old the non-profit is (our formal birthday is December 5).

Our funding so far comes from donations from companies that support our events, paid opportunities like the Wikimania Hackathon, a very small number of individuals and companies that believe in our broader mission.

There’s where you come in. If you, too, believe in our mission of helping free software projects grow in size and diversity, would you donate to help us continue that work?

Think of the cute baby penguin T-shirt! But also, think of the work we’ve done that you’re a part of: organizing effective outreach events, working with communities to bring more contributors and diversity, and teaching people online.

You can donate here.

In 2013, we’re focusing on gender diversity in our community. That means honing our Open Source Comes to Campus series and working with women in CS groups to create workshop and project nights to change the gender ratio with our practical, tested outreach. These in-person events bring bitesize bugs together with training missions and in-person mentorship.

To make that possible, we’re in the process of raising money from corporate event sponsors. Here, we can use your help. If your company might be interested in sponsoring the workshop series, let us know.

Moreover, if you personally can do so, we will very much appreciate it.

Our track record of understanding free software projects, providing hands-on teaching, and integrating with existing communities puts us in a position to really make a difference. So if you can, please help out by donating here.

Thank you tremendously from all of us board members,

— Asheesh Laroia, Mike Linksvayer, Jessica McKellar, Deborah Nicholson, and Karen Rustad.

I am happy to share with you all some details of our successful event – On Sunday Dec 16, Chang She conducted a Pandas workshop hosted by Pivotal Labs at NYC. Kick-started a little past 10 AM, he wound his way through the Pandas data structures for 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D, data, DataFrame components and indexing, accessing data via files and DB’s, broadcasting and some basic statistical computations.

It was not all theory, as all the participants were following and experimenting on their laptops, in part, thanks to Asheesh’s excellent laptop setup guide, enabling attendees to come with configured machines, making it easier to get going with Pandas. They worked on the small tasks/exercises that Chang gave out as the session progressed.

Post lunch, it was sprint time! Very exciting to see the attendees pored over their machines, trying to tackle Pandas bugs and using a list of bitesize bugs prepared by Asheesh. We worked in small groups of 2 or even 3 people with Chang going around each group to help and guide them, ably aided by Asheesh. The sprint went on till evening, when finally at 05:45pm, Pivotal Labs had to ask us to leave.

Pictures speak a thousand words: 

Here are some statistics, for those that love numbers:

This entire event would not have been possible without our generous sponsors. A huge Thank you to:

Thank You!
Thanks and Regards,
Vid

You might recall that a bit less than a year ago, we started taking pre-orders for the first OpenHatch t-shirt. Well, now there’s a new, double-sided t-shirt design for 2013! It’s our special gift if you donate to us by the end of the year.

Between now and January 1, if you donate $100 or more to the OpenHatch Foundation, you will receive a shirt as a thank-you gift for your generosity!

The shirt is printed on navy American Apparel fabric; we’ll have women’s and men’s sizes. When you donate, we’ll email you and ask what size you need — we can offer any adult size from S to XXL. The shirts are made in the US by a SF Bay area silkscreen printing company.

Want to support OpenHatch’s mission of making the open source software community more welcoming and diverse? Want a shirt with an adorable baby penguin on it?

Now’s the time to donate!

Photo: Five Leaves Coffee by Igor Schwarzmann

Welcome to the 5th OpenHatch newsletter!

The end of the year is coming, and our non-profit can use your assistance. If you can give anything, from $2 to $200 or more, we’d appreciate your donation and will put it to work bringing more people and more different kinds of people into free software: Donate now.

A few weeks ago, we highlighted Kevin Carillo’s Ph.D. research on newcomers’ experiences in free software projects. In early 2012, he interviewed Asheesh (a “huge help,” says Kevin). Since then we’ve worked together to get the survey into more communities. He has received over 350 responses so far! If you’ve joined the projects he’s surveying (Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD (including PC-BSD), GNOME, Gentoo, KDE, Mozilla, NetBSD, OpenSUSE, Python, Ubuntu and Wikimedia) in the past two years, do take his survey.

Events

We’re aiming for at least 3-4 Open Source Comes to Campus events from January through March 2013. We’ve been discussing it on the Events list; you can read the thread in the archives, or (best) just subscribe and join in!

We’ll have a special focus on open source and gender diversity in 2013, working with women’s colleges and women in CS groups to organize workshops and measure our results. If your company would be interested in sponsoring these workshops, drop us a line: hello@openhatch.org.

You might remember our productive PyCon sprint this year. Tim Ansell (mithro) made a video introducing what sprints are, and OpenHatch sprinters feature prominently in it. Very prominently….

We’ve had the honor of helping Sheila Miguez organize this weekend’s second Chicago Python Workshop. It is a “women and their friends” event, and the organizers ran into some prospective and actual attendees who, to put it mildly, did not understand the full purpose of the event. Asheesh helped them write emails to communicate their goals clearly and tactfully. We have put together sample text for everything from welcoming trans women to asking a problematic attendee not to come back. Give it a read and use our text when you find yourself in an awkward spot.

OpenHatch board members Jessica McKellar, Karen Rustad, and Asheesh Laroia all had talks accepted into the PyCon US 2013 program, and Jessica is keynoting! Hope to see you there!

OpenHatch web tech

We recently finished a rewrite of the most complex part of the website.

For a few weeks, we temporarily disabled listing project Q&A on the front page of the site due to heavy spamming. We wrote a quick tool that used SpamBayes to despam the site. Additionally, we de-spammed the forum where people ask for help with open source contribution and our training missions.

Welcome to Lloyd Watkin, who made his first commit in November, fixing a broken link our README.

OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

A team of seven people put together 24 Pull Requests, a site to encourage you to contribute to open source projects hosted on Github during December. Check it out and sign up!

The GNOME project is running a free software mentorship program called Outreach Program for Women. The program connects mentors with women contributing to open source, offering a paid internship in a community. Participating organizations include GNOME, the Wikimedia Foundation, OpenStack, Fedora, and more.

@webmink:

The secret of the amazing growth of the LibreOffice development community: “Easy Hacks”, like training wheels for programmers. #SFSCon

(OpenHatch aggregates bitesize bugs from over 300 projects.)

Canonical Ltd CEO Jane Silber, asked What advice would you give to women who would like to get into the technology industry but are hesitant or not sure how to do this?:

Know yourself, your interests, your strengths and play to those strengths. Don’t be embarrassed to seek support, advice or mentoring, and don’t run away at the first bump in the road. In interview situations, women are typically judged on actual experience while men are typically judged on perceived potential, so gain relevant experience through academic experience or, of course, contributions to an open source project!

Get involved

We can always use more people on our IRC channel to discuss events and the like. If you’re a programmer, get in touch on the Devel mailing list!

And it bears repeating: as a non-profit, we rely on the community for support. We need your help to get more people involved in open source, so please donate now.

Read previous newsletters.

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

Photo: Ladybird by William Warby

The OpenHatch volunteer opportunity finder helps connect people with tasks in free software by letting users browse bugs in open source projects. The promise has been that, daily, we download fresh tasks from projects’ bug trackers and let visitors browse them by difficulty, programming language, or kind of contribution. I’m thrilled to report that we’ve concluded a rewrite to the code underneath it.

For those interested in history, this is version four of the code. The first version was a one-off Python script that could download bug data from projects on Launchpad.net. It grew into version two, a big collection of Django and scraping code that ran through celery, parallelized with the Python multiprocessing library. Version two and a half was the same code, reconfigured operate without celery. Version three was a rewrite with asynchronous networking through Twisted, kicked off by Jack Grigg. However, we identified a few architectural problems and I personally didn’t have the Twisted chops to fix them the way I wanted to. Version four, the current edition, owes its beginnings to Berry Phillips at the PyCon 2012 sprints. It uses the fantastic scrapy library which itself uses Twisted behind the scenes.

I’ve personally learned a lot participating in all these versions. Technical readers might want to read the oh-bugimporters documentation or check out the code. The key change we’ve made in this edition is factoring oh-bugimporters out into an entirely separate package from oh-mainline, where the web app lives.

For everyone, if you have an open source project you want to see on /search/, here’s how you do it:

• Add your project to your personal OpenHatch profile by indicating you’re a contributor. You’ll have to log in to do that.
• Click on the project link, from your profile, to find the corresponding project page. An example: The Little Registry Cleaner.
• Scroll to the bottom and find these words: “No volunteer opportunities…indexed yet.” Right next to that, you’ll see a link labeled, “Add a bug tracker.” Click that.
• Follow the steps for your project’s bug tracker type, be it Bugzilla, Trac, Roundup, Launchpad, Github, or Google Code.

I want to thank all the people who’ve contributed to this part of the codebase: Adrian Ancona, Asheesh Laroia, Berry Phillips, Jack Grigg, Jacquie Flemming, Jason Michalski, John Morrissey, Karen Rustad, Mark Holmquist, Parker Phinney, Raphael Krut-Landau, Sharadha Ramakrishnan, and Will Kahn-Greene. Special thanks to John Morrissey and Karen Rustad for their recent code reviews.

The new framework makes it easy to add support for new bug tracker types, such as Jira, that have been requested by users. If you want to contribute, that’s a great way to jump in!

And if you’ve used the bug importer or the volunteer opportunity finder, I’d love to hear what you think and see what we should refine next.