Overview

The session starts with an extremely fast overview of OpenStack, geared toward giving the participants an idea of the different components and possible areas for contribution. We then go through creating the accounts, why they're all needed, and how to work with DevStack for the people who have installed it. From there we finally start talking about the contribution process itself, some general points on open-source and OpenStack culture then go through a number of ideas for small tasks suitable for a first contribution. After that it's down to the participants to work on something and prepare a patch. Some people chose to file and triage/confirm bugs. The last part is about making sure the patch matches the community standards, submitting it, and talking about what happens next both to the patch and to the participant as a new member of the community.

Preparing

During the weeks preceding the event, I ran two pilot workshops with small groups (less than 10 people) in my local hackerspace, in preparation for the big one in Berlin. That was absolutely invaluable in terms of making the material more understandable and refining the content for items I didn't think of covering initially (e.g. screen, openrc files) and topics that could use more in-depth explanations (e.g. how to find your first task), timings, and generally getting a feel for what's reasonably achievable within a 3-hour intro workshop.

Delivering

I think it went well, despite some issues at the beginning due to lack of Internet connectivity (always a problem during hands-on workshops!). About 70 people had signed up to attend (a.k.a. about 7 times too many), thankfully other members of the OpenStack community stepped up and offered their help as mentors - thanks again everyone! In the end, about half the participants showed up in the morning, and we lost another dozen to the Internet woes. The people who stayed were mostly enthusiastic and seemed happy with the experience. According to the session etherpad, at least 5 new contributors uploaded a first patch :) Three are merged so far.

Distributing the slides early proved popular and useful. For an interactive workshop with lots of links and references it's really helpful for people to go back on something they missed or want to check again.

Issues

The start of the workshop is a bit lecture-heavy and could be titled "Things I Desperately Wish I Knew When Starting Out," and although there's some quizzes/discussions/demoing I'd love to make it more interactive in the future.

The information requested in order to join the Foundation tends to surprise people, I think because people come at it from the perspective of "I want to submit a patch" rather than "I am preparing to join a Foundation." At the hackerspace sessions in particular (maybe because it was easier to have candid discussions in such a small group), people weren't impressed with being forced to state an affiliation. The lack of obvious answer for volunteers gave the impression that the project cares more about contributions from companies. "Tog" might make an appearance in the company stats in the future :-)

On the sign-up form, the "Statement of Interest" is intimidating and confusing for some people (I certainly remember being uncertain over mine and what was appropriate, back when I was new and joining the Foundation was optional!). I worked around this after the initial session by offering suggestions/tips for both these fields, and spoke a bit more about their purpose.

A few people suggested I simply tell people to sign up for all these accounts in advance so there's more time during the workshop to work on the contribution itself. It's an option, though a number of people still hit non-obvious issues with Gerrit that are difficult to debug (some we opened bugs for, others we added to the etherpad). During one of the pilot sessions at the hackerspace, 6 of the 7 participants had errors when running git review -s  - I'm still not sure why, as it Worked On My Machine (tm) just fine at the same time.

Overall, I'm glad I did this! It was interesting to extract all this information from my brain, wiki pages and docs and attempt to make it as consumable as possible. It's really exciting when people come back later to say they've made a contribution and that the session helped to make the process less scary and more comprehensible. Thanks to all the participants who took the time to offer feedback as well! I hope I can continue to improve on this.