[Events] Draft for approval: Welcoming OpenHatch to organize the pre-Wikimania hackathon

[Sumana Harihareswara]

Asheesh, once you approve this, I'll send it to wikitech-l and the
Wikimania public and planning lists. Thanks. -Sumana



OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free
software contributors with communities, tools, and education.  Wikimedia
Foundation is pleased to announce that we're partnering with OpenHatch
to make the upcoming pre-Wikimania hackathon even more useful.

Asheesh Laroia and other OpenHatch folks will be working with Katie
Filbert (Aude), Gregory Varnum (Varnent), and me to encourage and aid
the Wikimedia technical community, by designing and executing the
novice-focused half of the hackathon.  You'll see Asheesh in IRC as
"paulproteus".

I'm excited that we're working with OpenHatch on this.  I've borrowed
lessons from OpenHatch in structuring our events and educational
materials.  They are leaders in teaching new contributors, and in
building open source communities' capacity to nurture.  With OpenHatch's
help with this event (and with the documentation they write), I hope to
get scores of semitechnical Wikimedia editors over the barriers to
technical contribution.

OpenHatch will, among other tasks:
* Develop novice-focused curricula that include tutorials for novices
* Design at least three project-based exercises for novices, based on
the model OpenHatch created with its Python workshops
* Review existing public reference and tutorial material on the topics
* Update or write relevant instructional documentation on mediawiki.org,
including writing high-quality setup instructions for a new developer's
development environment
* Find on-the-ground volunteers to help address problems that newcomers
will face
* Disseminate lessons learned to the Wikimedia community

You'll see Asheesh and his colleagues in #mediawiki, #wikimania,
#openhatch, wikitech-l, Wikimania's lists, and the new
Wikimedia/OpenHatch event list:
http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/wmf-outreach-staff .  Welcome!

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation