Tag Archives: PyCon

PyCon 2012 poster: getting and retaining new contributors to open source projects

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My poster at the PyCon 2012 poster session was on getting and retaining contributors to open source projects.

A short video of me summarizing the poster is at http://pyvideo.org/video/692/2-twisted-matrix-high-scores.

The full-sized 4′x6′ poster pdf is here.

The poster strives to start a dialog in 3 areas of open source community management:

  1. Providing a welcoming environment with clear contribution guidelines and opportunities for new contributors.
  2. Identifying where in the ticket lifecycle a project bottlenecks and loses potential contributors, and how to incentivize community members to work on those bottlenecks.
  3. Resources for beginning open source contributors.

I use the Twisted Matrix High scores list as an example of one strategy to incentivize community members to work on ticket bottlenecks.

I happily got a lot of traffic in the poster hall, with a lot of people sharing their community stories and checking out OpenHatch and Twisted as a result (one Twisted sprinter even said he came to our sprint because of the poster!)

I was was right next to Brian Curtin, who had posters on the PSF Sprints and Outreach and Education committees. He funneled people to me to talk about the Boston Python Workshop grant.

For more on the poster session, see the call for posters, list of posters, and the full PyCon 2012 video list.

PyCon 2012: 5K

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I ran my first 5K at PyCon 2012. All proceeds from the event went to the the charities Autism Speaks, the American Cancer Society, and the Epilepsy Foundation.

An impressive 148 participants completed the 7am run. Jacob Kaplan-Moss and the other 5K organizers did a great job of keeping the event upbeat and encouraging newcomers. I hope to see more programming communities supporting and encouraging fitness through events like this.

Read more at the event page and see more photos on Flickr (thanks and credit to volunteer photographer Michael McHugh).

PyCon 2012 talk: Diversity in Practice

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I gave a talk with Asheesh Laroia at PyCon 2012 called Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python user group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women.

The video can be viewed online at http://pyvideo.org/video/719/diversity-in-practice-how-the-boston-python-user. Thank you to the PyCon organizers for orchestrating the lightning-fast turnaround time on subtitling and publishing the talk videos.

The slides are available here.

The talk was very well-received, with a great Q&A and many follow-up contacts from folks interested in running outreach events in their communities. Praise from Glyph, a long-time supporter who is leaving Boston soon for San Francisco, was particularly touching. We benefited tremendously from our practice run with the Boston Python user group.

PyCon 2012 talk

Abstract:

How do you bring more women into programming communities with long-term, measurable results? In this talk we’ll analyze our successful effort, the Boston Python Workshop, which brought over 200 women into Boston’s Python community this year. We’ll talk about lessons learned running the workshop, the dramatic effect it has had on the local user group, and how to run a workshop in your city.