[Events] Rackspace "How to Open Source" workshop at Berkeley

[Ying Li]

Hi all,

On April 5th, Rackspace (http://rackspace.com) and Hack Berkeley
(http://hackersatberkeley.com) ran a "How to Open Source" workshop at
Soda Hall, Berkeley, CA.  There were about 30-40 students in
attendance, approximately 15% women. There were 3 developers and 1
recruiter* from Rackspace in attendance.

[*] He seriously wanted to learn how to contribute to Open Source,
and is looking forward to workshop part II.

The goal was to introduce students to the process of finding an Open
Source project and contributing.  The workshop consisted of about 45
minutes of talking and slides, covering:

(1) why people contribute to open source

(2) a general overview of how to contribute to an open source project

(3) the Apache Libcloud project

(4) the Twisted project


This was followed by a 30 minute workshop in which students were
divided into 3 groups: those who needed help setting up IRC, those who
needed help with GIT, and those who just had questions regarding
specific projects or contribution workflow.


Postmortem and suggestions from Asheesh:

(1) Make the workshop happen sooner, or have multiple talk/workshop phases.

(2) Use exit surveys to see what students liked/disliked about the workshop.

(3) Give students the link to the slides sooner, so they can follow
along on laptops and check out links sooner.

(4) Use more time, possibly multiple days, to get to the part where
students successfully contribute patches to OS projects.

(5) Bring in more OS committers and contributors to help students
contribute.

(6) Assign each student a ticket to work on to make the next steps
more concrete.


I hope we do something like this again.
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