On Wednesday the 20th, we had the 2nd edition of Open-Source Night in Tog. I think it went well. Once again there was about a dozen attendees, many of whom have never contributed to open-source before. A third of them were also in Tog for the first time. It might be too early to matter but there was also very little overlap with the audience from last time.
Talks
We started the evening with 2 talks, meant to be about 15 minutes long each. Mark started the evening telling us about open-source licences and the philosophy they encapsulate/were born from. Then I walked through how one would go about contributing to Django, basically clicking through the Django website and explaining different tasks the project needs help with, particularly for bug fixing contributions.
After this, we had 2 lightning talks that were meant to last 2 to 5 minutes, to give people a chance to talk about a project they contribute to and get people to join in. This time the talks were more about ideas, which is fine, but both also ran overtime, which is less cool. I'm not sure if either found additional contributors/would-be contributors out of it for the evening.
Hands-on
The second part of the evening, the part that should be hands-on, didn't go so well. After the talks (which lasted for 1h30 instead of 45mins) and a tour of the hackerspace for the new people, most continued chatting instead of sitting down and getting things done. This especially saddened me for the ones who had never contributed before. The goal of the event is to help newcomers get started contributing, when they have experienced people at hand to ask questions to.
Next time
I'm not sure how to improve this next time and help attendees get started actually doing stuff. Running overtime for the talks really hurt for the rest of the evening, which is already such a short time to accomplish something. An idea: after my talk I was asked "How long would it take for someone to start from nothing to being able to run the Django unit test suite?" and maybe this kind of well-defined, self-contained task would be good to help people get started. It's not a contribution yet, but it's a first, necessary step toward it (for code contributions in any case), and it could be fun to try and mix this with some sort of open badge.
Somewhat related announcement: open-source night won't happen on April 17th next month but probably on April 24th instead. Check the tog.ie calendar for confirmation. If you're interested in speaking on a topic relating to the life of open-source or a project in particular, please get in touch :)