[OH-Publicity] SpinachCon blog

[Deb Nicholson]

Hi all,
Here's a preview link, http://openhatch.org/blog/?p=2523&preview=true I'm
in the process of getting an image of people sitting together spinaching to
insert.
Cheers,
Deb


On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Deb Nicholson
<deb at eximiousproductions.com>wrote:

> 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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