On Wednesday, Tog hosted the first monthly Open-Source Night.

It's an event I'd been wanting to organise for a while, with an eye on it being hands-on and slanted toward helping interested people get started in open-source, but I wasn't sure what format would work best. I'm still not sure, but in the spirit of release early, release often, I thought I'd give it a shot for a few months and iterate.

For the first event, about a dozen people showed up. About 7-9 of them had already made some kind of contribution, most people had a clear idea of the project they wanted to contribute to for the evening, and 3 were hesitant and not sure what they wanted to do.

We started with 2 super short talks, an ill-prepared one from myself about what to do tonight: basically find the contributor's guidelines for the project you're interested in and speak to the person next to you for help, since we had such a skewed ratio of experienced contributors. Triona followed with a talk on what she planned to do in the evening with Free Penguin, an open-source sewing pattern for Tux plushes. The maintainer hasn't updated nor responded to emails in years, so it seems it will need to be forked in order to start improving the documentation. Open-source projects aren't all about code! :)

I directed the hesitant project-less people toward Cheryl and the Dreamwidth project, which has an excellent reputation for being friendly to newcomers. Even without an experienced contributor around, I thought figuring things out together would be a fun learning experience. It may not have been that effective though, people were interested and looked around but nothing got accomplished (perhaps that is to be expected for a first couple of hours getting acquainted with a project and open-source?). Then further efforts were thwarted by technical problems (bugzilla down). Cheryl's thoughts abut this is that it's difficult to get into a project one doesn't feel strongly about (a similar downside applies to projects discovered via OpenHatch, as someone else mentioned to me).

There were a couple of serendipitous meetings, like the person wanting to get started with Debian packaging who happened to be sitting besides a Debian Developer.

But overall, I think having encouraged people to come along already having a project in mind made it difficult to form groups and encourage collaboration, because people ended up working on the project they had planned to alone. It may not have been a great experience, particularly for people who didn't know anyone or hadn't been in Tog before.

I also need to become more familiar with projects who have good, specific non-programming-related tasks for newcomers. I had a general idea but wasted time trying to find the details. We had a graphic designer interested in either contributing his design skills, translating or participating in testing efforts but I wasn't able to quickly find a good "Here's a concrete task you can do now" for some of the better known projects. He did discover InkScape and became eager to learn it, so I hope to see him again in Tog in a few weeks for teaching an intro workshop to InkScape :-) (Thanks Borud!!)