[Campus-uw-staff] inviting students to an open source software event on 16 Nov (free event)

[Ben Marwick]

Hi everyone,

I'm Ben Marwick in the UW Anthropology Department. On Sun 16 Nov 2014, 
Mako Hill (UW Communications) and I, along with OpenHatch.org and a few 
others, are hosting an eScience-supported event to introduce students to 
the free software community. Free software isn't just for computer 
scientists - scientists in all disciplines can benefit from using and 
contributing to open source projects in their fields.  I am hoping you'd 
help me reach out to students in your area who might like to attend.

Could you please send our announcement (below) out on your departmental 
mailing lists, student interest groups, or anywhere else you think might 
reach interested students?   If you also can CC me at 
campus-uw-staff at lists.openhatch.org that will help us know who we’ve 
reached.

Thanks, and let me know if you have any questions.

best,

Ben Marwick (Anthropology)
Mako Hill (Communications)
Ana Malagon (Physics)
Allan Ecker (Electrical Engineering)

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On Sun 16 Nov, OpenHatch and UW eScience are hosting a day-long open 
source software immersion event.  We invite you to join us!  You can 
sign up here.

You don’t need to be a programmer to contribute to open source, or to 
attend and enjoy our event.  Most open source projects are also in need 
of designers, translators, documenters, bug-finders and testers.

Open source software -- software that is shared freely and available to 
build upon -- has become part of our daily lives.  Popular projects like 
WordPress, Firefox, Adium, and Ubuntu have millions of users. All over 
campus, people use and contribute to these kinds of open source 
projects.  You can learn more about these projects, and start helping 
out with them, at our event.

In statistics people use and contribute to R, a popular programming 
language designed for statistical analysis, and NumPy and SciPy, 
libraries in the python programming language for doing statistical 
analysis with scientific data.

In the morning, open source contributors from various projects will 
teach you about open source licensing, collaboration tools, and how free 
software projects are organized. In the afternoon, they'll help you make 
hands-on contributions to open source projects. And throughout the day, 
they'll feed you, get to know you, and talk with you about opportunities 
for students in open source.

Open source participation is one way to gain real-world skills and make 
connections that will last you through your career. Volunteer staff will 
include professionals and academics who use open source daily.

The event is open to all students. Learn more, and sign up, here:
http://washington.openhatch.org/

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