[OH-Dev] Planned policy for what events should go on the calendar

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi all,

As part of the month's release goal of getting the events calendar online, I've written 
up a draft bit of text explaining what the calendar is for. I'll copy-paste it here:

Q. What kinds of events should go on the OpenHatch calendar?

A. We want to promote events that directly bring new contributors into free software, 
or teach background needed to participate in free software projects. We only list 
events that are free-of-cost or reasonably inexpensive to attend. They can be in person 
or online.

To us, there is a grey area where some events teach how to use proprietary software. If 
those events are free of cost and explicitly about helping users contribute to free 
software, then they can go on the calendar, too. For all these events, it's fine if 
there is a cap to the maximum number of attendees. We'd appreciate if you could update 
the OpenHatch calendar when the event fills up.

To give you ideas, here are a few types of events we like:

* Online ,"Open house" events, like Debian's "One day with Debian Perl Team" on July 1, 
2011 <http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2011/07/msg00002.html>

* Diversity outreach events for in-person programming meetups, like the Boston Python 
Workshop that OpenHatch co-organizes 
<http://openhatch.org/wiki/Boston_Python_Workshop_3>

* Parties to get newcomers involved 
in a free software project, like the Debian Bug Squashing Party held at MIT in December 
2008 <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/12/msg00513.html>

* Periodic meetings 
that are open to new contributors, like P2PU's weekly code status meetings: 
https://github.com/p2pu/lernanta/wiki/Dev-Meetings-2011

* (Theoretically) A free-of-cost hack fest that teaches how to use Adobe Illustrator to 
design logos for free software projects.

We're not particularly interested in events that simply teach how to use free software. 
To qualify, you have to be teaching skills needed in free software contribution (like 
programming) or directly getting people involved.

If people have comments, let's hear it. Otherwise, I'll make this a wiki page (and 
sure, it'll be on the wiki, so we can edit there, but I wanted to do a round of 
feedback here first).

-- Asheesh.