About OpenHatch

If you have never heard of open source: OpenHatch runs outreach events and maintains free, web-based learning tools, to help people get involved in collaborative software development; and we work with computer programming meetup groups to help them run more newcomer-friendly and gender-diverse events. These meetup groups are educational groups that meet free of cost to educate the public on computer software programming topics.

If you have: OpenHatch is a non-profit organization, and 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.

About the non-profit: We are a tiny Massachusetts not-for-profit organization, supported by dozens of volunteers who help maintain our web technology, which we share freely with the world under an open source software license, supported by dozens of volunteers who help make our free events possible, and financially supported by generous corporate sponsors and individual donors. Our sponsors page lists the past 12 months' sponsors.

Training missions
Interactive teaching tools on the web 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:

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. These events are free of cost, supported by donations to OpenHatch. In 2013, we are emphasizing organizing these with women in computer science groups.

Various online and in-person open source teaching events
Some examples of past events we have run

Affiliated events
The Boston Python Workshop (described below) is one example of an affiliated event. These usually free-of-cost are not run by OpenHatch, but its independent organizers decided to affiliate with us -- for more about that, read the Affiliated events page.

The Boston Python Workshop is a free of cost introduction to computer programming workshop for women and their friends who have no or minimal programming experience. It teaches the Python programming language. The workshop runs every 2 months with the Boston Python user group, and it has been a hugely successful and transformative event. Volunteers also help other people run outreach events in their cities, and recently received a grant (given to those independent organizers, not OpenHatch itself) 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.

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:

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