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 :)

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!!)

Ideas on how to evolve the format for next time:

Choose one project and make it the main focus of the evening, at least at the start. Meaning only one presentation, that is a bit longer (ideally 20 minutes, max 30 -- we still need time to actually do stuff!) and give specific, step-by-step instructions on "this is where you go to find something to work on, this is how you choose a task" and afterwards have the people interested in working on the project do so together - several people to one task can work, to encourage learning together and avoid getting stuck. People are still welcome to work on whatever else they want to of course. This was suggested by Ulrich based on the recent Debian Bug Squashing Parties he attended.

Becky said there was an interest in a GitHub pair programming type of exercise. People upload code on GitHub they never touch again. Working on someone else's code with the help of the author could turn into an instructive experience. It would also be cool to see what a pull request looks like from both sides.

I think we can try both these things for next time, the GitHub pair programming could start after the presentation for people not interested in working on the highlighted project.

Now. The next step is to find a project to highlight and a willing contributor who'd like to present and guide, for the next session on March 20th. Ideas, volunteers? :)

Feedback and general thoughts on evolving the format are warmly welcome as well.

Are you an experienced open-source contributor interested in recruiting new people for your project?

Are you a fan of open-source who would be interested in contributing at any level but isn't sure how to?

Come to Tog's first Open-Source Night on February 20th!

These hands-on sessions aim to bring together experienced open-source contributors with people who would like to get started but aren’t sure where to start or would generally benefit from having someone to ask questions to.
[...]
Every month we will start with a couple of people speaking for 5-10 minutes, to introduce the project they are working on, what is the usual path for contributing and where they are currently looking for help. Then we will form groups and work on making a contribution for the rest of the evening.

I'm hoping to make this into a regular monthly event. The current plan is to try it for a few months and see what it becomes. This will heavily depends on who attends so, help me recruit lots of interested people from both side of the contributor spectrum in Dublin :)

Cheryl will be teaching the first electro-sewing workshop in Tog, on October 21st! Have a look at the Tog post to learn more, including how to sign up. This will likely be followed by more electro-fashion workshops in the future, keep an eye out for them. I'm really looking forward to it, combining technology with artistic fields is bound to result in wonderful projects.

Come along and sign up to the workshop, learn how to use conductive thread and create a small circuit to make your very own LED flower :)

~ ~ ~

Do you work on something cool, in open-source or open culture or general tech? Would you like to teach a workshop about it, give people a taste of why it is cool and interesting? Please get in touch!

Congratulations to Python Ireland and the PyCon Ireland committee for the successful 2nd edition of the conference! If you weren't there, you should feel sad. I would be.

Lots of interesting talks and just like last year, a whole bunch of very friendly and knowledgeable attendees to talk to and share a meal with (or a drink, for lucky people who won several raffles... :o)) (hehe) (I did!)

I sadly missed the first keynote, which I look forward to catching up on on video. I was busy helping out at the registration desk, and discovered I really enjoyed welcoming attendees to the conference. A new hobby!

I don't know how productive in general Sunday was, sprint-wise and code-output wise. The open space format seemed to work well on the other hand! I attended the RSI talk and the buildout tutorial (must look more into Buildout) and spent the rest of the day PRing for Tog, distributing Berocca and talking shop. On Sunday afternoon, together with a fellow Tog member we stealthily stole away a dozen attendees to go and visit the hackerspace, conveniently located right behind the venue. Delegates were returned to the conference unharmed and inspired (I hope!).

And because one cannot ever have enough Python, the usual monthly meetup is on this Wednesday!

I'm back for more enabling! (Mwahaha) Seeing there was some interest in LaTeX, the very awesome Triona kindly offered to teach an evening workshop on the topic on September 21st, in Tog. Whether you're interested in starting out with LaTeX, or would like a refresher, join us! The registration information is available on Tog's blog.

- - -

Hello you! Do you know about something cool, relating to open-source or open culture or technology? Would you like to teach a workshop about it? Please get in touch!

Are you a programmer interested in picking up Python and Django?

Rory is running a crash course in Tog starting this Thursday. There'll be two 2-hours sessions -- the first one about Python, next week about Django.

It's short notice but if you've been meaning to learn Python, now's your chance!

More information, including how to register, over here.

I gave my presentation on "making your first open-source contribution" in Tog yesterday evening and I think it went down well; I enjoyed delivering the talk and received positive comments about it afterwards -- although I do need to speak louder. I'm enjoying lightning talks! Now, what to speak about next... :)

The slides are available on Slideshare (or PDF). I also gave a hand-out to give people a chance to check out the links afterwards.

- - -

On another note I think an evening of lightning talks was generally well received, and there is some motivation to run another similar event in 2 months. I'd love to have this be a regular thing. We need to be more strict on time-keeping though; surprisingly it seems people tend to feel bad for not speaking long enough, so they start just talking about random stuff or opening web links of cool things to show off... and interesting or not it feels like it's dragging on, particularly when one knows there's 3 or 4 more talks to go after.

I also got feedback from first time visitors that starting late "because people will be late anyway" makes it very sucky for people who don't know anyone yet, and also less likely that there'll be time to stick around after the talks to chat with the speakers and other attendees. I think we should start right on time next time (and to be fair, the 2 or 3 people who arrived between 7:00pm (announced time) and 7:30pm (actual starting time) were members... Not worth waiting for!!). It'd be nice to start on time and then encourage people to stay with drinks and cookies, or otherwise we need to find a social butterfly that is good at integrating people. :-)

Writing this down now, so that I can remember it in 2 months. Any other comments on the evening from people who were there, or general suggestions and tips on organising lightning talks?

(Irish Hackerspaces Week isn't over yet! Check out our other events.)

This week is Irish Hackerspaces Week (the link is for the Dublin events). On Thursday we will have the first ever Lightning Talks night in the space and I hope it will be successful -- I think it would be awesome to have a few short talks every month where members and visitors show off their projects or something cool they've learnt.

This Thursday I'll be giving one of the talks (10 minutes!), on "making your first contribution to open-source." I've had conversations with people who weren't sure where to start, and with this talk I'd be delighted if I can help at least one give it a shot. :)

Yesterday evening Google kindly hosted the GTUG meet-up, which I don't usually attend but considering some of my fellow hackerspace members were speaking on the panel I had to go and *cough*heckle*cough* support.

Google Storage and Predictions API

The first part of the evening was a talk by Martin Omander on 2 Google APIs:

• the Storage API

Figure out what you're good at so that you can focus on that (don't build your own telescope, use other people's tools). The Storage API is what Google use themselves, therefore they have people on pager to make sure it stays up so you don't have to. Libraries such as Boto work with it.

• the Predictions API

You feed it training data, over 3 steps: upload, train, predict. It can do categorisation (for e.g. language recognition), or return a number (e.g. real estate valuation). Input data can be text or numbers.

Hackerspaces and formal education

The juicy part of the evening was the panel, despite starting with a very biased intro from the moderator against education in favour of hackerspaces. Asking the panelists to choose a side might have also contributed to limit the discussion.

2 interesting topics straight from the panelists' introductions:

• To work around the lack of decent sysadmins around, John Looney from Google has created a short graduate program, where they train people for 5 months and then hire them.
• James Whelton is a startup founder that is currently working on "Coder Dojo", a project to bring programming and computing to kids. I had a quick chat with James after the panel and they are bringing this to Ireland, starting in Cork: it seems their process is to find mentors in a city, get the group started running events/workshops/classes on a Saturday afternoon and then they move on to the next city. I'm not quite sure it's a sustainable way to build a momentum but I will be following this very very closely, and perhaps mentor when they come to Dublin. Not entirely sure where to get the freshest source of info: Twitter account here, All Ireland (?) blog over there.

Someone mentioned Sugata Mitra's talk on learning without teachers again, I have to make the time to watch this.

A couple of interesting points:

• Hackerspaces as part of formal education, as a society, or part of the University -- someone brought up the problem of evaluation and how to grade work that would come out of such a setting; a panelist remarked that academia has been doing that for decades, with PhDs!
• If going the society way, be careful to build a community. It should help with getting momentum.

Although there was a nice flow when only the panel and moderator were speaking, I was disappointed with how the audience involvement and back and forth with the panel was handled. Some questions were completely ignored after being asked without giving a chance to the panel to answer, and people talking were encouraged to speak faster or less as we were running out of time. I would have preferred less questions explored more fully, rather than a rush of comments and unresolved question marks.

Everybody would agree there is much more to be discussed on the topic :) Thanks to the organisers for setting this up!

The origami workshop in Tog on Friday night was a success \o/

Turn-out was great despite a couple of late cancellations, another Tog member with strong origami powers stopped by to help out if needed, and everybody seemed to be having fun, and I think everybody learnt something new -- I certainly did, though I could bear to be told again how to do some of the shapes we built!

People came with varied levels of origami skills, and of maturity :-)

I need to start bringing a real camera to these event, my phone don't do them justice. I'm really enjoying these beginner friendly workshops on different topics. If you're around Dublin and have some interesting technological or artistic skills you'd like to share over an evening or week-end afternoon, please get in touch with me!

See also:

• Related post Tog's blog

The Squishy Circuits workshop organised in Tog yesterday was a success! Many thanks to awesome teacher Triona for showing us how to make a mess, I mean, have a lot of fun with conductive dough and learn a few basics of electricity and electronics :) Triona also shared tips on teaching the material, especially to kids.

Thanks a lot also to all our attendees for making the event such a success (and for helping clean up afterwards :-))! Notably this was a very kid-friendly event, and I hope we can have more of these in the hackerspace -- show first-hand the next generation of could-be scientists how fun and interesting science and technology are!

A tiny sample of the afternoon's creations:

(Update: You can see more pictures over at the Tog website)

On July 2nd, I will be facilitating a workshop on Squishy circuits, kindly hosted by Tog and taught by Tríona O’Connell.

Squishy circuits are a great way to demonstrate electrical circuits to kids (and adults!). It consists of a conductive dough and an insulating dough that are used in the building of circuits, along with batteries and more usual electrical components like motors and LEDs. During the workshop, we will make some batches of both types of dough, and afterwards we’ll see some useful demos you can use to teach with it, and also have some hands-on fun building circuits.

For more information, including how to register, see the Tog announcement.

If you're around Dublin and knowledgeable about some cool open project for which you would like to share the love with that kind of event, please get in touch with me! I would love to have more of these workshops in Tog! See my About page for contact info.

I've decided to try something different and will be holding Python "office hours" in Tog on Thursday evening. It's not really a secret but I'm not exactly advertising it either. I sent an email to my former students for Thursday's test run, and depending on how it goes I may hold these regularly and be more vocal about it.

What is it going to be about? This is sort of a follow-up to an intro course, for people who have a project but can still get stuck and could use some guidance. Or for people who want to reinforce  their knowledge of Python/get up to speed by doing exercises, with someone nearby to give a hand if needed. Basically it's for people who want to do their own thing, with the knowledge that if things don't work there's someone who should be able to help in the room, rather than hours of frustration in sight. Or that's the idea! This isn't a course, I won't be teaching or lecturing or erm talking that much. If no one needs help I'll be working on my own stuff.

I look forward to seeing how it goes. Drop by Tog ( map ) anytime between 6.30 and 9pm this Thursday if you're interested! And feel free to drop me a note (see About page) if you're curious but not sure if it's a good fit for you.

In December, I'm going to embark with a few other people on a "sew-along" adventure targeted at beginners. My sewing skills are limited to sort-of-putting back together fallen buttons and er that's about it, so this should be an interesting experience!

This is the first post from Gertie about this, the person leading the sew along project.

The second one is about getting fabrics.

Truth is, I am fairly lost right from the first post. There's a lot of vocabulary I'm missing, other things I plain don't understand and because I'm not familiar with the field it's difficult for me to visualise what's supposed to happen, even after reading up on the words and concepts.

Thankfully Cheryl knows a thing or two about sewing (all that Lilypad awesomeness must be good practice!) and didn't freak out when I called her "Mentor" so she'll be helping :) Already learning a lot from her post about measures and fabrics, will do the measuring thing later on this week.

I ordered the pattern and fabric from Sewbox in the UK (not received yet). I may shop around Dublin to find a nicely coloured fabric for the tie, though I'm not quite sure where to look for something like that. 

The actual sew along adventure begins on December 6th, until then it's about getting the pattern and fabric. There will likely be impromptu meetings in Tog to work on this, you're very welcome to join in if interested! (We can make all sorts of terrible mistakes together \o/)