Re: [Wikimania-l] Welcoming OpenHatch to organize the pre-Wikimania hackathon

OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education. Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce that we're partnering with OpenHatch <http://openhatch.org/> to make the upcoming pre-Wikimania hackathon even more useful. Asheesh Laroia and other OpenHatch folks will be working with Katie Filbert (Aude), Gregory Varnum (Varnent), and me to encourage and aid the Wikimedia technical community, by designing and executing the novice-focused half of the hackathon. You'll see Asheesh in IRC as "paulproteus". I'm excited that we're working with OpenHatch on this. I've borrowed lessons from OpenHatch in structuring our events and educational materials. They are leaders in teaching new contributors, and in building open source communities' capacity to nurture. With OpenHatch's help with this event (and with the documentation they write), I hope to get scores of semitechnical Wikimedia editors over the barriers to technical contribution. OpenHatch will, among other tasks: * Develop novice-focused curricula that include tutorials for novices * Design at least three project-based exercises for novices, based on the model OpenHatch created with its Python and open source workshops * Review existing public reference and tutorial material on the topics * Update or write relevant instructional documentation on mediawiki.org, including writing high-quality setup instructions for a new developer's development environment * Find on-the-ground volunteers to help address problems that newcomers will face * Disseminate lessons learned to the Wikimedia community