January 19, 2011
Asheesh Laroia is speaking at Pycon in Atlanta this year, and will present a draft of his 30-min talk, “Get new contributors (and diversity) through outreach”:
This talk is targeted at anyone involved in an open source project who wants to find more contributors.Programs like Google Summer of Code often provide excited students who disappear after a summer’s work. Meanwhile, request for help emails on development lists are typically met with silence. Hackathons create a flurry of commits, but then we never hear from the participants again. Expanding your team is possible, and it requires care in terms of outreach, expectation management, and mentorship.We will discuss three major forms of outreach:
- One-on-one check-ins with participants,
- Periodic drives to bring in new contributors, and
- In-person teaching events.
Each one has “do”s and “don’t”s associated with it. This talk digests the experience of effective outreach into practical strategies that you can re-use within your project.
Then we’ll turn our attention to more mundane matters: this discussion about installation chaos (http://www.meetup.com/bostonpython/ideas/583191/) seems like a good topic for a freewheeling session. I don’t know exactly what we’ll cover, so bring your questions, answers, and opinions.
Have an installation issue that’s been bugging you? Have you come up with a novel way to solve the tension between Python packages and OS packages? Just need help getting a particular package to finally work right? Confused by virtualenv, pip, easy_install, pypi, etc? Come to the meetup and get into the mix.
If we run out of installation stuff to talk about, we’ll start on something else, who knows what? The floor is completely open, bring your Python grievances and adorations.
Meetup link: https://www.meetup.com/bostonpython/events/15979297/