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 endeavors:

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:


 * The 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: we run workshops 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 is currently pursuing nonprofit status. The OpenHatch board is:
 * Asheesh Laroia (President, Treasurer)
 * Jessica McKellar (VP)
 * Karen Rustad (Secretary)
 * Deborah Nicholson
 * Mike Linksvayer