[Peers] Rough sketch of products

[Asheesh Laroia]

Right now, OpenHatch is doing some things. Which things?

To answer that, here is a quick summary of the "products" we currently 
offer. Michael Stone suggested I write this up, and I wanted to get his 
feedback and also let everyone on the list join in the conversation.

1 Campus outreach events

The opportunity here is that there are lots of students at universities 
who have the technical skills to get involved in free software, but don't 
learn in class how to interact with the community.

Evidence indicates that there is enthusiasm among students for events like 
this, and urban legend in free software suggests that university students 
are in a good position of desire to learn, the availability of spare time, 
and support resources that make them good contributors to free software.

Early versions of this product focused solely on the experience of the 
attendee. I believe that future iterations must see the campus computing 
group as the customer as well; we can help those groups grow in numbers 
through our outreach event. By partnering with the campus computing group, 
we also identify a community for our event attendees to join.

The value of this product is first, to the free software community as a 
whole: the hope of bringing more people into free software. It teaches the 
attendees the skills they need to contribute; they might use these as 
volunteers contributing to free software for fun, or it might simply learn 
the skills they need to participate from time to time when their future 
software engineer position requires them to communicate with an open 
source community.

2 Volunteer opportunity finder

This is a product we offer to people who want to contribute to free 
software. In particular, if you know your skills and you know you want to 
help, this tool lets you browse available entry points in free software 
projects by the skills.

The opportunity here is that many prospective contributors to free 
software ask, how can I contribute? What projects need my help?

People find value in a volunteer opportunity finder when they find a good 
task to work through it; the secondary audience, project maintainers, find 
value when new contributors show up to their projects.

3 newcomer friendly event calendar

This is a product we offer to people who want to contribute to free 
software. It lists events in free software projects or in free software in 
general that welcome new contributors.

The opportunity here is that we can open the doors to existing communities 
that are open, but where many people in the world do not know how open 
those communities are. This is especially applicable to development 
meetings that take place on the IRC channels. We also want to highlight 
in-person events for new contributors.

The recipient of this product receives value when he or she arrives at a 
community and sees that it is active, and through the conversation with 
that community discovers how he or she can become involved.

This product also integrates nicely with the campus outreach events; we 
can invite attendees of those events to these online communities.

4 Project pages on the openhatch site

This is a product offered to people who want to contribute to a particular 
software program, but do not know how. We make that possible by showing 
product maintainers a set of questions that get them into thinking about 
how people can help them.

The opportunity here is that, by seeing a person's description of what 
work the project needs, somebody will feel, “I could do that!” This is why 
the project page asks questions we believe evoke a human characteristic in 
their answers.

The value to the project maintainers is that there is a chance that a new 
contributor will come to the project through the project page. We have 
already seen this in the case of geeklog. Similarly, people who have 
skills to contribute to free software in ways that are not usually encoded 
as bug reports will feel more included by reading about how they are 
needed.

5 Diversity outreach events for meet up groups

The product here is diversity outreach events that invite members of the 
public who are part of underrepresented groups to attend the meet up, and 
strategies to integrate those new people with the existing meet up 
community.

The customer is either an attendee or an organizer of the meet up event.

The opportunity here is that by changing the face of the these highly 
visible technical communities, we increase the chance that new people 
coming to that community will find people who seem like them. We believe 
that this will increase retention within technical communities of people 
who are generally underrepresented.

The value to meet up is that, in every case we have asked, organizers and 
attendees of these events wants to have more diverse attendee pool.

6 Web forums within OpenHatch

The Product here is that users of the OpenHatch site, and prospective free 
software contributors in general, can discuss the site and our community 
without needing to use a mailing list.

The opportunity here is that OpenHatch gets more feedback from people 
about the site and about free software in general.

The value to users of the forum is that they can communicate with website 
maintainers and new, friendly people who like helping people get involved 
in free software projects.

7 Training missions

We offer interactive learning tools to prospective contributors to free 
software projects. One way that people learn that they should use the 
training missions inside the recommended them from a project that needs 
contributors have the skills that the training missions teach.

The opportunity here is that by creating this safe clear space for people 
to learn the skills, we make it easier for people who are less sure of 
themselves to become contributors. People who learn how to contribute to 
free software by going to the tutorials can probably skip some of the 
painful learning process that most contributors go through. the result 
should be a community that grows faster, where more people are more 
skilled quicker.