[OH-Publicity] SpinachCon blog

[Deb Nicholson]

SpinachCon Zero == A Huge Success!

BOLD Sometimes your favorite free software has a piece of spinach in its
teeth, and they need you to let them know.

We had a really great group at the inaugural SpinachCon (
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/the-0th-spinachcon). Around 30 people
participated in friendly user-testing, aka pointing out the "spinach" in
free software. Four projects; Hyperkitty -- a user-facing Mailman
application, Inkscape -- fantastic vector graphics editor (
http://www.inkscape.org/en/), LibreOffice -- a free office suite (
https://www.libreoffice.org/) and MediagGoblin (http://www.mediagoblin.org)
brought machines and tasks for users to test. We had a mix of people who
were in town a bit early for LibrePlanet (https://libreplanet.org/2014/)
and locals from our awesome Boston/Cambridge area Desktop GNU/Linux Users
group (http://www.meetup.com/desktop-linux-users-group/). The end result
was a lot of great and varied user feedback for the particpating projects
over the course of the five hour event.

As the person who asked everyone to participate, I have a ton of
thank-you's to dispense. Industry Lab (http://industry-lab.com/) was very
gracious as we slowly sucked all their spare tables and chairs into the
spacious room we took over for the day. MediaGoblin's technical lead Chris
Webber took time out from the middle of a busy funding campaign (
http://www.mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html) to set up some testing
instances. Robinson Tryon took an incredibly early train down from Vermont
to lead people through LibreOffice tasks. Máirín Duffy brought HyperKitty
(and her tiny daughter) into the city so we could all see the new face of
Mailman. Martin Owens also brought his small daughter in and took notes as
people worked their way through Inkscape tutorials. We hit some small snags
-- not unexpected whenever you're trying to do something new -- and I'd
like to thank all our attendees for being so patient and understanding.
Lastly, thanks to the Open Invention Network (
http://openinventionnetwork.com/) for buying us lunch; lots of spinach
salad and plenty of pizza were eaten.

We also have some exciting plans for the future. As you may have guessed by
where this blog's been posted, OpenHatch is going to be the official
organizational home for SpinachCon going forward. Once we've sorted through
the data and suggestions we gathered at the first event, we'll improve the
tests and materials so they can be shared and used at other events.
OpenHatch has long been interested in finding more substantive ways for
non-technical contributors to participate in the creation of free software,
so this is a great fit! OpenHatch already hosts it's very popular "Open
Source Comes to Campus" events at schools around the country. We often get
asked, "What can we do next?" and hosting a SpinachCon will soon be one of
the answers we can give.

In the short-term, we're looking to schedule another local event. In the
spirit of meta-spinach finding, we'd love to hear your comments on how to
make the second SpinachCon even better if you attended last Friday's event.
We'll be announcing the next local iteration via the Boston Desktop
GNU/Linux Users group (http://www.meetup.com/desktop-linux-users-group/).
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