Events/Affiliated

What it means

A great way to do that is to make your upcoming outreach event be "affiliated with OpenHatch." If you want to do that, our community is here to help you, and to invite you to become a part of it.

An affiliated event is run independently by a team of enthusiastic event organizers. Being affiliated means that organizers of other OpenHatch-affiliated events (including OpenHatch staff) will aim to help you as much as possible on the following things:

• Helping you set a clear outreach goal for the event.
• Helping you achieve it! That means, for example, help or advice with finding space, fundraising, website organization, finding speakers, writing a laptop setup guide, teaching your instructors how to be good teachers, the signup process, and finding attendees.
• Helping you measure it. That means, for example, help or advice creating a sign-up process, writing and interpreting exit surveys, and reaching back into the community you hope to change and seeing if your participants have been retained.
• Helping you talk about how great it was. That means, for example, help or advice taking and publishing great photos, writing blog posts, getting the word out about those posts to the relevant communities, helping you write conference talks that showcase all that.
• Helping you review what to do better next time. That means, for example, providing respectful, helpful feedback in private and on the Events list.

A key aspect of OpenHatch-affiliated events is that we aim to first improve existing communities where possible, rather than create new smaller communities. The principle guides us because we've seen how effective programs like Railsbridge San Francisco, Boston Python Workshop, and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women transform the communities they touch.

Here's what we would like from you. They're suggestions, not requirements, but they're strong suggestions.

• Join the Events list! http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events
• Email the Events list when you are finding staff, so that other excited people near you can offer their assistance. (Naturally, as an event organizer, you choose whose offers to accept, so that you can build the event you want.)
• Use exit surveys as part of measuring if your event was a success, as experienced by attendees.
• Actively check up on your outreach goals by seeing if the community has changed in the ways you wanted it to.
• Take photos of the event, and put them on the web, preferably shared under a free license.
• Write a wrap-up post for your event, and post a copy on the OpenHatch blog.
• In your event website, use our Code is fun logo, link to this page, and proudly write that you are affiliated with OpenHatch!

Two essential requirements:

• Your event must be intentionally friendly to newcomers, as part of our educational and community-growing mission.
• It should be related to programming and open source communities.

(If an event or its organizer manage to somehow do things totally not the OpenHatch way, we'll let you know that we'd rather you stop calling your event affiliated with our community. I've never heard of such a case, but I figured the idea is worth mentioning.)

We all work together, as a community, to make education and outreach part of all of our programming and open source communities.

A list of affiliated events

If you want affiliate your event with OpenHatch, we'd love you to join our community! Just add your name, your event name, and its website here:

• All the events run by OpenHatch itself. (Added by Asheesh Laroia.)
• Chicago Python Workshop, added by Sheila
• Railsbridge Boston, added by Brendan Kemp
• Indianapolis Python Workshop, Columbus Python Workshop, and Dayton Python Workshop, added by Catherine Devlin
• Boston Python Workshop, run by Jessica McKellar
• Montreal Python Workshop, added by Julia Evans
• Philadelphia Python Workshop, run by Dana Bauer