[Peers] Me becoming a volunteer

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey all,

I wanted to send a note about some staff changes at OpenHatch Foundation, 
Inc.

As context, right now OpenHatch has two people on its payroll: Myself, as 
full-time executive director (we were able to raise enough for that as of 
July 1 2012), and Shauna Gordon-McKeon, who works as a contractor with us 
as of early 2013.

Starting tomorrow I'll be transitioning out of my role as full-time 
executive director. My formal paid responsibilities end at the end of 
October.

I'm going to stick around on the board; OpenHatch matters a great deal to 
me still, and it's why Shauna and I are going to be working together on a 
fundraising campaign soon and have been working together on the 2013-2014 
planning that you've been seeing on the list. I'll stay on the board and 
active on the devel list, and so forth.

It sounds so final and formal. What's going on is that I think I can be 
most useful to OpenHatch if I focus on planning and fundraising, and I've 
been personally itching to do some work that is more technical in nature. 
Shauna's been able to do more and more of what I've been doing, in terms 
of organizing Open Source Comes to Campus workshops, and that's been a 
real pleasure to see. The work we'll do in the next year is focused on 
taking the workshop and helping others beyond Shauna and me teach it, too.

The other thing I'm going to keep doing is reaching out to Python user 
groups as part of the grant we received from the Python Software 
Foundation 
<http://openhatch.org/blog/2013/psf-funds-openhatch-to-reach-out-to-and-help-python-user-groups/>. 
I'll keep doing that as a volunteer.

When I began thinking about moving on, one thing I quickly realized is 
that OpenHatch (the organization; the collection of activities; the brand 
centered around being welcoming to newcomers) is so much bigger than me. 
Thinking about moving on suddenly made me think more about how to involve 
so many other great people in what we do, and to appreciate all the work 
that they/you do to make that possible. Together, we donate; we write 
guides for new contributors to our open source projects; we design and 
distribute stickers and T-shirts; we volunteer at in-person events to help 
people feel invited, welcome, and well-trained to participate; we find 
sponsors who support us; we publicize all this work to motivate others to 
act similarly; we plan so that we can do more of all of this.

So -- I'm honored to have y'all's company, and I'm still here and remain 
excited about being a part of that.

-- Asheesh.