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.
#teaching
41 posts
- Read more → More from Relational Tech →
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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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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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Mistakes Were Inevitably Made
Read more → More from Rethinking Power →All models are wrong. Given this, it should be no surprise that humans are constantly messing things up. But don't worry! That's often a good thing, because messing things up is how we learn.
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Introduction to Python Programming Guide
Read more → More from Parsons Blog →Welcome to our Intro to Python Programming guide! It is designed for people without much experience in either programming generally or using Python specifically.
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A Python Testing Demo
Read more → More from Duly Noted →The intro to testing session I ran on Saturday went well. Unfortunately the resolution on Hangouts on Air recordings is not good enough to read my code, so it’s pretty much unwatchable (though folks who saw it live were able to see what I was doing).
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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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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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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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Memo From the Office of Open Science
Read more → More from Open Science Collaboration Blog →Dear Professor Lucky,
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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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Slides from the Southern California Anything Linux Expo*
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →\* A friend asked what SCaLE stood for, and I got everything but the 'a'. He laughed and said, "It could mean literally anything!" For the record, it's the a in *Ca*lifornia.
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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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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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Chasing Paper, Part 3
Read more → More from Open Science Collaboration Blog →*This is part three of a three part post brainstorming potential improvements to the journal article format. Part one is here, part two is here.*
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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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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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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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The end of an era
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've been doing Iron Blogger, in one form or another, for almost two years now. That's over a hundred weeks of posts, with a few misses here and there, paid for in beer. I try to make each post substantive, meaningful to someone, even if just to me.
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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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Psychology Links
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I spent last Saturday teaching neuroscience/psychology to 100+ kids via Splash. It was a survey course, so there were a lot of references and recommendations I made, and some of the kids asked me to put them all in an email. It's a good list, so I thought I'd also share it here.
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Busybody
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've been a bit busier than usual the last few weeks. Missed last week's post. More beer for everyone! Here's a list of things I've done between my last post and now. (Why yes, this is a pretense for skipping another week. Glad you asked.)
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One time, at hackerspace freeschool camp...
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Just finished off my three weeks at camp with an afternoon of making chocolate gears, legos, and chess pieces using the latex molds we created during the week. The chocolate gears did not actually function as gears, so I am 0 for 1 on attempts for my friend Dan's moving wedding cake, but I'm going to try again with better gears. (Also on the list of ideas to try: a sterling engine made of rock candy, and a helium-filled fruit leather balloon. I still like the chocolate gears idea best, though.)
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Making Things & Making Things Happen
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Missed last week because I was so busy at camp. The first week of the summer is Girl's Invention Week and instead of the usual 7ish:1 ratio of boys to girls, we had forty awesome lady campers. We built a loom and an interactive mosaic from scrap wood, made soda using dry ice, programmed lots of video games with Scratch, went geocaching, had a thoughtful group conversation about gender identity and gender essentialism, and baked some delicious marshmallow bread. It was fabulous.
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Three Talks
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I've given three public talks in the last six months. What really strikes me is how different these talks were, in content, structure, and intent.
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Hunting Grounds
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The last two weeks my attention has been pretty well captured by Parts & Crafts, the summer camp my housemates run. They invited me to come teach this past session, which was themed 'Imaginary Worlds'. We made card games, choose your own adventure books, chocolate aliens, telegraphs - but by far everyone's favorite activity was the Puzzle Hunt.
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Pour some sugar on me…
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The last couple of days have been FULL of cake. My friends' theater company turned five this summer, and they requested a cake from me to have at their celebration. They're called Flat Earth Theater, so the design for the cake was obvious:
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Balloon Geometry
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Yesterday my friend Nagle and I ran an activity at Bring Your Grandmother To Math at the MIT Museum (a part of the Cambridge Science Festival). A few days earlier, we'd spent an afternoon reading through Vi Hart's blog for inspiration. We looked at the Mobius strip music box, Penny sierpinski triangles, and followed a link to a tricycle with square wheels. We were briefly entranced by various foods in various shapes before finally deciding on a less messy version: balloon geometry.
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Ilm-al Nafsiat: The Science of Self
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →I spent pretty much all my free time last week studying for the psychology GRE subject test, and I have to say that I resent how much I now know about Freud. It's not that I think studying the history of a discipline is pointless - far from it. But the history of psychology that the GRE tests is, how shall I put this\... painfully white and Western.
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Natural Born Scientists
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →*Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order in their experiences - "which is the mostest? which is the leastest?" They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.* \~ Buckminster Fuller
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Community Supported Education
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →Parts and Crafts, the kids' hackerspace that I've been working with on and off since the summer, has launched a kickstarter. They've made an awesome video to go with it:
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Learning in the Time of Cholera
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →A few weeks ago, I spent the afternoon at Parts and Crafts, the learning-by-doing oriented summer camp a friend of mine co-founded. I wanted to try out a style of teaching I've been thinking a lot about lately. Inspired by role-playing and puzzle-hunting, I want to create expansive, immersive learning experiences which allow kids to "re-invent the wheel" as well as to see the cultural context in which technology is created and scientific advances are made. It's my hope to incorporate into each "experience" two or more of the following: science and technology, philosophical and political history, arts and literature, themes of social justice.
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How to Make an LED Bracelet in 10 Steps
Read more → More from Shauna's Blog →The other day I was visiting my friend's summer camp when I saw a young camper fiddling around at the electronics table. She showed me the bracelet she had made by twisting wires together in patterns, and said she liked to have "a different take" on electronics from the boys at the camp. After talking a little bit about conductive thread (her mind, it was blown) we set about making a bracelet that incorporated a basic circuit. From our experiences, this is how you do it:
