Students like you around the world are gaining valuable experience, connections, and skills by coding, testing, and writing for free software projects like Firefox, WordPress, Wikipedia's backend code, and SAGE.
You do not need to know how to program to contribute to free software. You can contribute code, but also original art, testing, documentation, web design, or anything else. We want to teach you how to join them.
On Tuesday, March 19 and Thursday, March 21 evenings, we want to bring you up to speed on open source projects and help you contribute to a real community.
On Tuesday, we'll teach you about open source licensing, collaboration tools, and how free software projects are organized.
On Thursday, we'll help you make contributions to open source projects.
And throughout the two evenings, we'll get to know you, and talk with you about opportunities for students in open source.
Space is pretty limited and we want to prepare to meet your needs. Please sign up in advance by filling out this form. Don't delay!
Free, open source software is software that is shared freely and available to build upon. It is a great way to apply your skills to real-world projects and social causes. You can participate by writing or reviewing code, answering users' questions, translating the interface to another language, making video tutorials to help new users, and myriad other ways. Open source software is often produced by lots of people collaborating across time and space, and this event specially welcomes newcomers to that style of development.
Open source participation is one way to gain real-world skills and make connections that will last you through your career. Volunteer staff will include professionals and academics who use open source daily.
The event is put together by Asheesh Laroia and Shauna Gordon-McKeon of OpenHatch, with the help of CSUA. A shout-out to AWE and WICSE members; please join us!
We're a non-profit that helps people get involved in open source. You can learn more.
If you want to get in touch with us, the best thing to do is to email us. Try this: hello@openhatch.org
Want to chat ahead of the event? Ask questions on #openhatch on FreeNode. Consider using IRC your first open source accomplishment :) Click here for web chat.
Now is the time to scroll up and make sure you sign up!