[Events] Thoughts about running outreach-oriented events with the FSF (Notes from lunch, September 2011)

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi John,

I wanted to email with the notes from our conversation a couple of months 
ago.

(Hi Events list! I thought I'd also CC: the OpenHatch events list, so 
y'all can follow along as well if you're interested. John said in IRC 
that'd be okay.)

Deb and you and I met up in September, and here is what I wrote down as 
notes.

John mentioned that there is a GNU Volunteer Coordinator volunteer group, 
gvc at gnu.org. It's not well-tracked, and maybe they could use the 
OpenHatch.org "I want to help" interface for tracking new prospective 
contributors. (Editor's note: This will be even more likely when we create 
an interface for marking people as checked-off. In our last sprint, we 
created a backend for this.)

"Savannah people didn't stick," I wrote. (Editor's note: Does this refer 
to code volunteers who didn't stick around?)

John said he might be interested in a GNU-y clone of the Boston Python 
Workshop for women and their friends.

John said he was wondering how the FSF could reach out to universities 
here to get interns. John asked if he could speak at Jessica McKellar's 
upcoming Cluedump about getting involved in free software projects. 
(Editor's note: Sadly we didn't make this happen. John, you and I can talk 
more details about this if you want, in a new thread!)

Deb asked if there is an FSF person who wanted to try attending one of our 
events to see how they work. John said he might be interested. (Editor's 
note: John, we have a Boston Python Workshop coming up in a week and a 
half. Are you interested in coming to the staff training session and/or 
visiting the event to get a sense of it? 
http://meetup.bostonpython.com/events/42610202/ has the info about how to 
sign up. There's a bpw-staff at lists.openhatch.org list you should join 
(moderated, but say I sent you in the signup message) if you want to get 
the inside view of staff.)

We discussed the possibility of organizing some GNU hackathon before or 
during LibrePlanet.

We wondered aloud which GNU projects might work well for a 
new-contributors event

I mentioned that Emacs users are likely people who might be willing to 
contribute to the core, since they are reasonably-likely to know Emacs 
Lisp.

We came up with this list of good ones:

* Emacs

* MediaGoblin

* F-Droid
** has a Python backend
** has a Java (Android) frontend
** has a git-based metadata directory that people can contribute to 
without coding

(Editor's note: I think a good next-step would be for Deb, John, and I to 
talk more about which sort of event we will try to help organize, and when 
it might happen. That's likely to be off-list. If people want to join 
that, email me off-list!)

-- Asheesh.