[UbuntuWomen] Hi!

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 10:02 AM, ॥ स्वक्ष ॥ <vid at svaksha.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 10:59, Janice D'Sa <dsajanice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> This is my first email to a list of possibly more than 500 (?) subscribers,
>> so pardon my nervousness. :) I'm Janice, I work full-time as a C programmer
>> and am a huge fan of Ubuntu. I have been using it for at least 4 years now.
>> I just got back from the Grace Hopper Conference last week where I attended
>> a lot of sessions on contributing to Open Source. I came back really
>> motivated to explore the possibilities. I've been browsing the Ubuntu-women
>> wikis to find a list of projects/bugs that needed work, but I wasn't able to
>> find any. So, I would really appreciate if someone could help me find it.
>> I'm not yet sure what areas I would like to contribute to, but I'm sure a
>> list of TODOs would help me decide.
>>
>
> Welcome Janice :)  Hmm.. I wish I could have attended GHC *sigh*
>
> We've always had women mailing this list listing their
> programming/tech skills and we usually re-direct them to specific
> communities within Ubuntu and you raised an interesting and important
> point about finding a project to contribute to. Currently the way its
> done is by using keywords to search Launchpad.net for bugs. Ex. search
> for "perl" / "python" packages, or search for a specific project of
> your choice and squash the bugs listed there. I assume this can be
> confusing and/or intimidating for someone who is new to the community.
>
> I've been wondering how UW can collaborate with other Ubuntu teams
> needing help. Say, if somebody is interested in "perl and networking",
> could Launchpad be scraped for this information and the results fed
> into planet.ubuntu-women.org so that folks could subscribe to the
> rss/atom feed. I'm not aware if such an app already exists or if there
> are any API's available which can be used for data-mining LP? The last
> I looked, openhatch.org was doing something similar. This is just me
> thinking out loud so if anyone knows more or is interested in working
> on it please holler. I'd love to help track/improve the way we search
> for information.
>
> Thanks for reading.
>
> --
> Regards,
> vid ॥ http://svaksha.com

Hi Janice, nice to see you! I hope you will be able to attend one of
our monthly meetings, where we do talk about things that need doing
for the project. However, as vid says, there is lots of places to
volunteer! I think it's important to pick out some project that really
excites you, and hang out for awhile with the users and developers,
and feel out what sorts of things they might need, that you can do.
This is what I did for Amarok, which is my most-beloved music player.
They needed a new Handbook, so I'm writing it! And learning so much in
the process, and meeting such great people, all of whom share my
enthusiasm for the project.

That said, OpenHatch itself is a super project, and is run by
wonderful people. Asheesh, take a bow! Yes, he's part of the
Ubuntu-Women project, and an all-around good human being. Especially
if you want to fix some small bugs, and get a feel for what you enjoy,
OpenHatch is a good place to find those.

One of the key ways to "hang out" is to use IRC, especially on
Freenode, where many FOSS projects have their official and off-shoot
channels. #ubuntu-women and #ubuntu-women-project (logged) for
starters, and #amarok if you share my enthusiasm, #openhatch if you
want to check that out.

Sorry, didn't mean to chatter on so. Hope to see you around!

Valorie
-- 
http://linuxgrandma.blogspot.com
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