About OpenHatch

OpenHatch is an open source project with the goals of lowering the barriers to entry into open source contribution and increasing diversity. We achieve these goals through a number of initiatives.

Training missions

Complete training missions on the OpenHatch website to get experience with common tools of open source development.

IRC community

OpenHatch has an active IRC channel, #openhatch on Freenode, where we mentor a bunch of new contributors, both on OpenHatch and on other projects. It's a great place to ask questions and get help working on bugs in a friendly, low-pressure environment. We've helped many people contribute to open source projects for the first time through this channel. You are invited to join us!

Outreach events

OpenHatch runs outreach events of several flavors, including:

Boston Python Workshop

The Boston Python Workshop is an intro to Python workshop for women and their friends who have no or minimal programming experience. We run the workshop every 2 months with the Boston Python user group, and it has been a hugely successful and transformative event. We also help other people run outreach events in their cities, and recently received a grant from the Python Software Foundation to bring the workshop to 3 new cities in the US. Check out:

• the Boston Python Workshop mission.
• a photo slideshow from the workshops.

Open Source Comes to Campus

Open Source Comes to Campus is a series of workshop run on college campuses to help teach students the community knowledge and technical skills to participate in globally distributed software projects.

Project Rolodex

The OpenHatch site has a project rolodex and indexed bugs that help match projects and volunteers. You can browse projects and bugs based on your interests and desired programming languages. In particular, we have "bitesized" bugs that have been identified as good, small tasks for new contributors.

The OpenHatch Board

OpenHatch a Massachusetts not-for-profit corporation, awaiting an IRS determination letter on our 501(c)3 status. The OpenHatch board is:

	Asheesh Laroia: President Asheesh loves growing camaraderie among geeks. In the past, he has chaired the Johns Hopkins Association for Computing Machinery and taught Python classes at Noisebridge, San Francisco’s hackerspace. He realizes that most of the work that makes collaborative projects successful is hidden beneath the surface. He has volunteered his technical skills for the UN in Uganda, the EFF, and Students for Free Culture, and is a Developer in Debian. He has worked at Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation as a software engineer, designing and scaling web systems. Today, he lives in San Francisco, CA, working on OpenHatch.org.
	Jessica McKellar: Vice President Jessica wants more people to be excited about and science and computing. She is an organizer for the Boston Python user group, lead organizer for the Boston Python Workshop, and a mentor with several Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) outreach initiatives at local schools in Cambridge, MA. She is a contributor to several open source projects and enjoys helping bring new contributors into the community.
	Karen Rustad: Secretary Karen is a software engineer at Disqus. She recently graduated with a master's degree from UC Berkeley's School of Information, with interests in Python-based web development, user experience design, free software communities, and technology law and policy. She has been involved with OpenHatch since its startup incubator days in 2009, contributing to the project's design, codebase, and mission. She served previously on the board of Students for Free Culture from 2005 to 2008.
	Deborah Nicholson Deb works at the intersection of technology and social justice. She has over fifteen years of non-profit management experience and got involved in the free software movement about five years ago. She currently splits her time between MediaGoblin -- a federated media-hosting start-up, Open Hatch -- a non-profit dedicated to identifying and mentoring new free software contributors, the Open Invention Network, and Harvard, where she is slowly pursuing a graduate degree in Information Technology. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Mike Linksvayer, Treasurer Mike Linksvayer has served as Vice President and CTO at Creative Commons, where he started in 2003. Previously he co-founded Bitzi, an early open data/open content/mass collaboration service, and worked as a web developer and software engineer. He lives in Oakland, California.

Get involved

Want to contribute to OpenHatch? Want help contributing to another open source project? We'd love to hear from you.