[TOS] Introducing myself and OpenHatch

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi friendly TeachingOpenSource people!

I've been lurking on the list for a few weeks, and I thought I would take 
a moment to introduce myself and a project I'm working on.

About me:

I'm a 24-year-old kid named Asheesh. I like Free Software, having gotten 
into it 10 years ago when I read the GNU Manifesto that was part of some 
text editor I was using called "Emacs". Since then, in addition to 
helping with code, documentation, and bug management, I've been involved 
in various community groups.

I took leadership roles in my local college Association for Computing 
Machinery. Since it began, I've been involved with Students for Free 
Culture, an international student movement supporting online freedom of 
speech, access to knowledge, and a bottom-up participatory culture. I'm a 
Developer in Debian, and most recently I was a software engineer at 
Creative Commons.

Over the years, I've gotten a hunch that there's more we can do in Free 
Software to encourage participation. TeachingOpenSource fits right in to 
that for me; by a 2001 survey (if I recall my stats correctly), one-third 
of contributors to open source are students. And yet so many of the 
students I met at Hopkins had no idea what open source was. There's room 
for improvement, and college is a great place to find time and mentors 
for young programmers to understand open source and become involved.

And, about OpenHatch:

I'm currently working full-time on a project to solve some other issues 
in open source involvement.

You might know that many projects tag bugs as good for newcomers. I read 
about a new such tag, "StudentProject," on the TeachingOpenSource Planet. 
Quite a few projects do this; Python calls bugs "easy", and OpenSolaris 
calls them "bitesized". I think it would be great if there were an index 
of these opportunities, categorized by programming language, so everyone 
could find easy places to get started in Free Software.

So, we made it: http://openhatch.org/search/

And I think it would be great if there were a place you could list your 
projects and experience in Free Software. Most of the projects I've 
contributed to, I'm not a committer. I toss patches here and there. So 
Ohloh.net's repository index undercounts my contributions. So we made a 
place where you can list the various ways you've helped projects out over 
the years. That can be code, documentation, translations, system 
administration -- whatever you're proud of, you can list.

That's the profile system at http://openhatch.org/

And once you have a profile saying who you are in the community, we 
figured it would be nice if you could list what you know, what you want 
to learn, and what you are willing to mentor people in. So when you edit 
your profile at OpenHatch, you can add more info about yourself.

We just launched the website two weeks ago. If there are any problems 
with it, let us know; there's a feedback button on every page that takes 
you to our bug tracker. (And the source code to the site is available, 
too.)

So that's what I'm working on full-time these days. Once we grow some 
more, I want to actively run some in-person mentoring events based on the 
OpenHatch community. I'm keenly listening to the mentoring conversation
taking place on the TOS list.

Our big next step is that, in the coming week, we're going to reach out 
to projects to grow our index of bugs.

But one big thing I'd like to ask you guys is: What are existing open 
source community websites missing? How can OpenHatch (as it is today,
or as you could imagine it changing) fill those gaps?

http://openhatch.org/ , in case you're interested. And if not, sorry 
about the long description. I hope it's relevant to a few of you!

-- Asheesh.

P.S. Depending on the phase of the moon and how much sleep I've gotten, I'll 
write "Free Software" or "open source." I don't mean to draw up a debate 
between the two terms but instead point out that they are practically 
synonymous for me.

-- 
Here I am in the POSTERIOR OLFACTORY LOBULE but I don't see CARL SAGAN
anywhere!!