How to Run a Whole Community Sprint
Most open source project sprints are focused on code contribution. While this makes some sense---open source software is, after all, *software*---it's also a little narrow-minded.
#community
39 posts
- Read more → More from Relational Tech →
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Governance Questionnaire
Read more → More from Relational Tech →It can be helpful for communities to take stock of their existing governance now and again, especially if they're facing some kind of major challenge, opportunity, or transition.
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Visibility Spectrum Exercise
Read more → More from Relational Tech →Some work within a software project is celebrated. Designing and building a new project from scratch, or adding big features to an existing project, is enjoyable and often prestigious work.
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FRAME-ing First Tasks
Read more → More from Relational Tech →There are many ways for newcomers to participate in a project, from testing onboarding documentation to reviewing pull requests to showing up to community events. But it can be surprisingly difficult to find ways for newcomers to contribute code.
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Context-Building Tasks
Read more → More from Relational Tech →Many potential contributors have a desire to contribute but lack knowledge about the codebase and the community that would help them contribute effectively. Context-Building Tasks are tasks which do not require a lot of context, at least at the beginning, but encourage the contributor to learn more and more context as they continue with the task.
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Deciding How to Decide
Read more → More from Relational Tech →When embarking on a governance transition, projects are often faced with an unexpected question.
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"It all goes back to what's best for the community": An interview with Python's Carol Willing
Read more → More from Relational Tech →Carol Willing was a crucial part of Python's governance transition from a BDFL model to a Steering Council. She served on the first Steering Council and has also been involved with Jupyter and its governance. This interview was recorded in January 2023, as part of a research project led by Seth Frey and funded by the NSF's DASS grant program. The interview has been lightly edited for readability and shared with Carol's consent.
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Psychological Safety: An Exercise
Read more → More from Relational Tech →In early 2024, PlasmaPy maintainer Nick Murphy asked me to help facilitate a workshop for their project. This "summer school" would bring together community members of all kinds, from undergraduates to faculty, from experienced open source contributors to people who barely knew what open source was.
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The Privilege of Play
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →"Move fast and break things" was the internal motto of Facebook up until 2014 they realized, a little belatedly, that perhaps a corporation with worldwide reach and hundreds of millions of active users shouldn't make recklessness its motivating principle.
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The Politics of Feedback in Software Development
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →As we've discussed previously, all systems are built on abstractions, and all abstractions are at least a little bit wrong. The more complex and important a system is, the more likely it is that a leaky abstraction will gum up the works. So systems need feedback mechanisms to detect when an abstraction is leaking, so they can identify and fix the problem.
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Roadmaps, Surveys, and Community-Led Software Development
Read more → More from Parsons Blog →Every progressive group ought to ask themselves occasionally, "Who are we fighting for? And how do we know what their needs really are?" Self critique, reflection, and open dialogue are vital tactics for organizers, and our work as maintainers of Parsons is no different.
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Five Reasons People Don't Give Feedback
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →In my last post, I talked about how all systems have flaws, and how these flaws require interpretive labor to be patched or worked around so that the system can keep running. These systems become dysfunctional when it is hard or impossible to learn from that interpretive labor what those flaws are. Without good feedback mechanisms, none of the flaws will be fixed, and the system will not adapt to changes.
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Identity fragments
Read more → More from Out of Many →In an essay at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova sketches out a conception of identity as a collection of fragments which is, paradoxically, being repressed and sanded down by identity politics:
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Openly structured communities
Read more → More from Duly Noted →If someone asks me, “What is open source software?”, I have an obvious answer: “Software that is licensed as open source and makes its source code available for users to review, modify and share.” Ditto “What is open science?”, to which I’d respond: “Science that is made available to review by anybody and available to reproduce by anyone with the necessary skills and equipment.”
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When Thing Z is problematic
Read more → More from Duly Noted →I have seen this argument happen over and over again, especially in progressive spaces.
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Moving On
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →Back in February 2013, I ran my first Open Source Comes to Campus event. It was a snowy day with a small but enthusiastic turnout. At one point during the workshop at the end of the day, a student I was pairing with said something which has stuck with me ever since: "Today has been very empowering for me regarding my computer and the ways I can manipulate it."
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Preparing for the PyCon Sprints
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →A year or so ago I wrote the In Person Event Handbook to help people prepare their projects for in-person events like workshops, hackathons, and sprints. With the PyCon 2015 sprints coming up, I thought I'd take a moment to write up the highlights. Want to make your project welcoming to newcomers? Read on!
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How Did We Do? Part I
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →A year ago I wrote a post titled 'Goals for Open Source Comes to Campus in 2014'. This is the first of the promised posts -- let's review how well we met our goals, to help us better reach our goals for next year!
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A Semester of Events
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →## (17 of them!) Last fall, we ran seventeen events at campuses around the country, reaching hundreds of students and making abundant contributions and connections. Here's a whirlwind tour of our semester:
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Be a poster child!
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →Would you like to present at an open source conference, but aren't sure what to talk about, or feeling shy? A poster can be a great way to get started. Not only are they less nerve-wracking to present, they're often more likely to be accepted than talk proposals. Yesterday evening, October 1st, we held a meetup on our IRC channel to brainstorm poster ideas for PyCon 2015.
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Open Projects - Open Humans
Read more → More from Open Science Collaboration Blog →*This article is the second in a series highlighting open science projects around the community. You can read the interview this article was based on: edited for clarity, unedited.*
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Short Event, Big Impact: Open Source at SUNY Stony Brook
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →I spent weeks going back and forth with Hanne Paine, a student and open source enthusiast at SUNY Stony Brook. For every date she suggested, we already had an event planned. Finally, we decided to wait until the fall to hold a full workshop. I felt badly, though. I knew I'd be passing through New York City in April, right around the dates she'd been pushing for. "How about I just stop by for a couple hours on a week night and do a short intro presentation?"
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Summer Internships for Open Source Enthusiasts
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →It's the heart of internship application season, and we want to spread the word about opportunities to contribute to open source this summer. The following list of internships are all funded, open to (though not always limited to) students, and taking place over the summer.
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Introducing setup sprints
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →On Tuesday night we had our first official setup sprint -- an IRC get together where OpenHatch volunteers test an open source project's installation and contribution process and documentation. Our inaugural project was Oppia, a tool which helps non-technical users create interactive educational activities online. Three volunteers (Carol Willing, Anurag, and myself) spent two and a half hours working with Oppia maintainer Sean Lip testing and improving documentation. The quick, casual feedback process meant we made a bunch of changes, including restructuring the documentation to be easier to navigate, adding explanations (and/or links to tutorials/guides) where documentation was too terse, and changing the output of the testing suite to be more understandable. We also managed to create the project's 100th issue.
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Goals for Open Source Comes to Campus in 2014
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →At OpenHatch we have big dreams. One of them? Keeping better track of our dreams.
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Open Projects - Wikipedia Project Medicine
Read more → More from Open Science Collaboration Blog →*This article is the first in a series highlighting open science projects around the community. You can read the interview this article was based on: edited for clarity, unedited.*
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When Open Science is Hard Science
Read more → More from Open Science Collaboration Blog →When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open - in open science, open source software, or any other open community - can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed.
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Congrats to friends of OpenHatch at PyCon 2014!
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →The list of talks, tutorials and posters accepted to PyCon 2014 was announced yesterday. Excitedly, we took to Twitter to congratulate the many OpenHatch community members who had their proposals accepted -- only to realize there's no way they'd all fit in a single tweet! We decided to write a blog post instead.
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Ready, Set, Contribute: a handbook for preparing your open source project for events
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →Today, we're releasing a handbook to help open source projects prepare themselves for events.
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What contributing to open source can give back to you
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →Contributing to existing open source projects isn't just about improving those projects -- it's a chance for contributors to grow, too. When we run Open Source Comes to Campus events, we love seeing students exposed to their first projects that aren't throwaway coding exercises. Working on open source projects can teach anyone a lot about software engineering and collaboration. Here's some of what *we've* learned:
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Open Source Comes to Campus
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →A little less than a year ago, I was asked to direct OpenHatch's Open Source Comes to Campus event series. Open Source Comes to Campus is a workshop designed to introduce college students to open source, to teach them how to use tools like version control and issue trackers, and to guide them through making their first contributions. When I joined, OpenHatch was averaging two events a year. I was asked, hopefully, if I could run seven events in 2013.
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The Conversations We Aren't Having
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Here are two stories about conversations I didn't have this week:
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Infrequently Asked Questions: Bloomington
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →*At each Open Source Comes to Campus event, participants ask unique, thought-provoking questions. We decided to write down these questions and answer them more fully on our blog. If you have any additional suggestions or advice, please add them in the comments!*
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Five Women Bringing Open Source to Campus – for Ada Lovelace Day 2013
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →For Ada Lovelace Day this year, we decided to profile some of the women who have helped us organize and run our Open Source Comes to Campus events. The five women below are just a few of the dozens of amazing hosts and mentors we've had the honor of working with.
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Hacking the hackathon
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Friends, romans, civic tech enthusiasts, lend me your eyeballs. I come to bury hackathons, not to praise them.
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Teaching Open Source at Northeastern University
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →!bostonsummer On Saturday, June 22nd we ran our tenth Open Source Comes to Campus event, at Northeastern University. Many thanks to Ali Ukani and the Northeastern University ACM for hosting.
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Infrequently Asked Questions: Wellesley College
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →*At each Open Source Comes to Campus event, participants ask unique, thought-provoking questions. We decided to write down these questions and answer them more fully on our blog. If you have any additional suggestions or advice, please add them in the comments! *
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Teaching open source at UMass-Amherst
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →On Sunday, April 14th, we ran our ninth Open Source Comes to Campus event, at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Many thanks to Tariq Ahmad, Andy Yee, UMass IEEE and UMass ACM. Check out the photo gallery!
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OpenHatch at Transparency Camp on May 4-5, celebrating open government
Read more → More from OpenHatch blog →TransparencyCamp is a yearly unconference to celebrate, and work toward, government transparency. It's run by the Sunlight Foundation, and we're honored to be a sponsor! Asheesh Laroia and I will be attending, and Sunlight Foundation has set aside a special area to help open government-oriented open source projects build stronger communities.
