[OH-announce] Celebrating our successes and winding down as an organization

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi OpenHatch fan,

[permalink]
<http://blog.openhatch.org/2017/celebrating-our-successes-and-winding-down-as-an-organization/>

Today, with OpenHatch board members Mike Linksvayer and Deb Nicholson, I’m
announcing that we’re winding down the organization.

Since 2009, thousands of people have been a part of, or been
positively-impacted by, OpenHatch and our community. I’m proud of what we
accomplished with so many enthusiastic volunteers and a small number of
energetic paid staff at various times. Mike, Deb, and I haven’t been able
to give OpenHatch the attention it needs to succeed over the past couple of
years. We’re winding down the organization to acknowledge this truth.

To celebrate OpenHatch’s efforts, successes, and community, I’m throwing a
party in Portland, OR,
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/openhatch-party-near-pycon-tickets-34553275778>
during this year’s PyCon! If you have fond memories of OpenHatch, I hope
you’ll attend. At PyCon, over the years, we’ve run productive code sprints,
seen inspiring talks, shared our own lessons-learned, and co-organized
events to put our ideas into practice. The location is to-be-determined
once I know how many people will attend. Please RSVP here
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/openhatch-party-near-pycon-tickets-34553275778>
and join me and others on Friday, May 19.
Looking back in gratitude

Of all the people involved in OpenHatch over the years, Shauna
Gordon-McKeon deserves a special mention. In 2013, she took the lead role
running the Open Source Comes to Campus event series, having first
volunteered in 2012. Open Source Comes to Campus was the most successful
thing OpenHatch did. There were 47 in-person events under her watch from
2013 through 2015, 13 of which were co-organized with women-in-computing
groups. These events touched thousands of people in that time. I will be
forever grateful for her tireless efforts and the incisive and optimistic
way she questioned my assumptions.

I’m personally touched by all our enthusiastic fans and volunteers. You
believed in us because we believed in you. OpenHatch has always been about
empowering people to take control of technology. I am humbled by all the
optimism, collaboration, inspiration that I’ve seen, and I know there’s so
much more of it that I never got a chance to see. Thank you all for being
so kind to each other.

If I can help you personally think about how to grow open source
communities or diversity in free software, then drop me a line personally;
<http://www.asheesh.org/about/> I’ll happily volunteer time to help you,
schedule permitting. I’m hopeful that this winding-down announcement will
remind people of how much we can each achieve when we spend time growing
the size and diversity of the the open source and free software community.
OpenHatch and the broader movement

OpenHatch was one part of a broader movement around improving diversity and
inclusion in free software and software generally. As Mike, Deb, and I wind
down this one organization, we’re heartened by those who push the movement
forward. Three stories stand out in my memory.

In 2010 and 2011, Deb Nicholson and I agreed to organize the first Boston
Python Workshop for women and their friends. The event came out of my
desire to understand Railsbridge’s successes over 2009-2010
<https://www.slideshare.net/sarahmei/moving-the-needle-how-sf-ruby-got-to-18>
and translate it to Open Source Comes to Campus. Jessica McKellar, whom I
met through the Twisted community, co-organized the event, and she quickly
demonstrated that she deserved to run the event. In 2013, she became the
PyCon Diversity Outreach Chair, where she still serves and delivers results
that speak for themselves.
<https://twitter.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595?lang=en>
Meanwhile, my talk about BPW at PyCon 2011 inspired Audrey Roy
<http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/events/2011-April/000142.html> to
found PyLadies. <http://www.pyladies.com/> Today, PyLadies is an
international mentorship organization with 64 locations all over the world.

In November 2014, Sean Lip volunteered at an Open Source Comes to Campus event
at UC Berkeley. <http://berkeley.openhatch.org/> Toward the end of the
event, students heard presentations from six open source projects. Sean
presented Oppia, his open source project to host interactive online lessons
for any topic, and I watched as nearly half the room volunteered to work
with him. He told the room that he would make sure that every attendee
could contribute usefully to his project, and I think this promise sealed
the deal for many of his new volunteers. When he onboarded new
contributors, he asked three key questions: What do you like about the
Oppia project? What’s one skill you have? What’s one thing you want to get
better at? I was impressed by how quickly Sean got to know his new
contributors, and equally by his report that most of his new contributors
were active volunteers many months later. I was impressed, so I did my best
to incorporate these questions into a newcomer event at Debian’s yearly
conference last year. <https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/83/>

In 2015, Shauna Gordon-McKeon brought OpenHatch lessons back to PyCon by
organizing an Introduction to Open Source & the PyCon Sprints
<http://blog.openhatch.org/2015/preparing-for-the-pycon-sprints/>. PyCon
has always <https://wiki.python.org/moin/PyConDC2003/SprintPlan> invited
new people to join open source projects at the sprints. Historically, each
participating project was responsible for onboarding its own newcomers.
Shauna's introductory event united newcomers with helpful volunteers
independent of project, and it attracted nearly 100 attendees. The event
has become a fixture at PyCon, and Shauna was able to deliver it again in
2016. At this year's PyCon, Chalmer Lowe is delivering the introduction to
the sprints; he attended Shauna’s event, and over the past year, he evolved
it into a hands-on workshop.

I feel humbled to know that the organization’s vision and lessons live on
in new ways, with new people.
What’s next for the organization

Given OpenHatch’s relative inactivity over the past two years, I believe
that winding OpenHatch down is more efficient than performing a search for
new board members. For me personally, I feel a need to focus less on free
software and tech generally so I have more time for music, my own family
connections, and non-software forms of political involvement. In the words
of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct,
<https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/updating-the-ubuntu-code-of-conduct> my aim
is to have the organization step down considerately.
<https://launchpad.net/codeofconduct/1.0>

*Finances.* Mike, Deb, and I are extraordinarily grateful for the donations
and sponsorships that sustained our organization. We have come to the
conclusion that the best use for our small amount of remaining money is to
gracefully wind-down the organization, then donate the rest to Outreachy
<https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/>. Outreachy organizes diversity-seeking
internships twice a year with a number of free software organizations,
including 39 internships this summer alone. OpenHatch will cancel recurring
donations effective today.

*Programs.* I’d love to find a new organizational home for Open Source
Comes to Campus. If you’re interested, please send a two-sentence email to
asheesh at asheesh.org with: (1) Your organization’s name or your name, and
(2) What you see as a plausible accomplishment you might have in the first
year of revived Open Source Comes to Campus. I’m hopeful that I can find
the program a new life, share the lessons I’ve learned, and connect you
with people who have run these events. Students still want to organize the
events. For example, during April 2017, students City College of San
Francisco worked to organize an open source comes to campus on their own,
<http://discourse.openhatch.org/t/proposed-event-at-city-college-of-san-francisco-2017/230>
though they decided to defer it until the fall for now. You can step up to
help groups like them.

*Websites and software.* OpenHatch has built and deployed a lot of software
and websites, and I’d like to keep a copy online for as long as possible.
The general strategy will be to move them to static website hosting,
perhaps GitHub pages. I plan to do this myself, which may take me a few
months. Specifically:

   -

   I’ll be working on disabling the dynamic features of the various
   OpenHatch websites. The code will continue to live on GitHub, but I’ll
   indicate that it’s not in active use. It’s already open source software.
   -

   I’ll snapshot all the dynamic websites, then retire them. I’ll aim to
   keep all content online or transition it to a new home with redirects. It
   might take a couple of months for me to get to everything.
   -

   As part of my decreased free software involvement, I am mostly retiring
   from IRC. I am looking for someone to be the owner of #openhatch for
   freenode’s records.

Finally, if you have any happy memories you want to send me, feel free to
email them to asheesh at asheesh.org. I would be honored to read those stories
at the party, and make a blog post collecting those stories, if you permit.
If you need anything from me, I hope you’ll let me know. If I’ve forgotten
some aspect of the wind-down and how it affects you, please drop me a line.

It’s been my honor to serve you all, learn from you, and work with all of
you people reading this. Truly. I hope you’ll consider attending the party!
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/openhatch-party-near-pycon-tickets-34553275778>

Asheesh Laroia.

*Thanks to Britta Gustafson, Greg Price, Jim Garrison, Lisa Hewus Fresh,
Mike Linksvayer, Nathan Yergler, Parker Phinney, Philip James, and Sumana
Harihareswara for providing helpful feedback on this text.*
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