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[OH-announce] OpenHatch newsletter, December 2012

Mike Linksvayer ml at gondwanaland.com
Sat Dec 8 23:48:05 UTC 2012


Welcome to the 5th OpenHatch [0]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: [1]Donate now.

  A few weeks ago, we highlighted Kevin Carillo's Ph.D. [2]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 [3]take his survey.


Events

  We're aiming for at least 3-4 [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 [5]thread in the archives, or (best) just
  [6]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 at openhatch.org.

  You might remember our [7]productive PyCon sprint this year. Tim Ansell
  (mithro) made a [8]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 [9]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. [10]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 [11]keynoting! Hope to see you there!


OpenHatch web tech

  We recently [12]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 [13]quick tool
  that used SpamBayes to despam the site. Additionally, we de-spammed the
  [14]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 [15]broken link our README.


OpenHatchy but not OpenHatch things around the web

  A team of seven people put together [16]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 [17]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.

  [18]@webmink:

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

  (OpenHatch aggregates [19]bitesize bugs from over 300 projects.)

  Canonical Ltd CEO Jane Silber, asked [20]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 [21]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 [22]donate now.

  [23]Read previous newsletters.

  [24]Like, follow @openhatch at [25]identi.ca or [26]Twitter.

References

   0. https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/openhatch-newsletter-december-2012/
   1. https://openhatch.org/donate/
   2. https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/a-research-project-to-understand-what-does-it-take-to-retain-newcomers/
   3. http://kevincarillo.org/survey-invitation/
   4. http://campus.openhatch.org/
   5. http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/events/2012-December/000383.html
   6. http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events
   7. https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/ten-contributors-hacked-oh-during-pycon-sprints/
   8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdS1GMERqVQ
   9. https://openhatch.org/wiki/Chicago_Python_Workshop/Chicago_Python_Workshop_2
  10. https://openhatch.org/wiki/Women_and_their_friends
  11. https://us.pycon.org/2013/events/keynotes/
  12. https://openhatch.org/blog/2012/volunteer-opportunity-finder-bug-importer-rewrite-complete/
  13. https://github.com/openhatch/oh-antispam
  14. http://forum.openhatch.org/
  15. https://github.com/openhatch/oh-mainline/pull/89
  16. http://24pullrequests.com/
  17. https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
  18. https://identi.ca/conversation/97050975
  19. https://openhatch.org/search/?q=&toughness=bitesize
  20. http://www.siriusopensource.com/content/qa-session-jane-silber-ceo-canonical
  21. http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
  22. https://openhatch.org/donate/
  23. https://openhatch.org/blog/tag/newsletter
  24. https://www.facebook.com/openhatch
  25. http://identi.ca/openhatch
  26. http://twitter.com/openhatch


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