Google Summer of Code 2014 Blog : About

Welcome to my blog for my Google Summer of Code 2014 project, coordinated with the University of Waterloo for credit towards my undergraduate degree as the topics course CS 499R: FOSS Contributions. Here I'll provide a quick introduction to my project as well as relevant links.

Introduction

The scope of this project is to provide a tool to event organizers that will allow them to more easily assemble a "hot list" of bugs for a particular event.

OpenHatch's mascot, Sufjan

Why OpenHatch?

OpenHatch is a project dedicated to introducing newbies to open source software and culture. We achieve this through outreach, events, and our website, which serves training missions and a large source of aggregated bugs from projects across the web.

At our events, we help beginners get started in open source by guiding them towards resources and training that will allow them to apply their skills. Often, we'll have a set of bugs prepared for the attendees to work on, selected for their difficulty, required skills, time to complete, etc. Right now, the process for creating a set of bugs to share at an event involves a spreadsheet and some laborious searching of our database. We might share issues with event attendees using a Google Doc or MoPad. But this process is labor-intensive, does not scale, and is not user-friendly. If OpenHatch could streamline this process, perhaps we could offer this more accessible tool to anyone that wants to organize a sprint.

Why me?

I joined the OpenHatch community after meeting Asheesh Laroia and Carol Willing at a conference and getting reprioritized to contribute with them (and not WordPress, sorry WordPress) during the open source day.

I have been an on-and-off contributor since then, giving a small introductory presentation to open source at a hackathon using the Open Source Comes to Campus slides, stuffing envelopes on vacation in San Francisco, etc. School was conflicting with my ability to contribute to the project, so the obvious solution was "why not make OpenHatch into school?" A couple of topics course proposal forms later and here we are. This was one of three projects I might have chosen to work on this summer.

Links

Here are some possible links of interest for those following my project.

Project documentation

Communication