Open Source Comes to Campus, for Chicago women at UIC and beyond

The Background

People like you around the world are gaining valuable experience, connections, and skills by coding, testing, and verbing for free software projects like Firefox, WordPress, Wikipedia's backend code, and SAGE.

You do not need to know how to program to contribute to free software. You can contribute code, but also original art, testing, documentation, web design, or anything else. We want to teach you how to join them.

The events

On Wed 9/26 and Thu 9/26, in SEO 1000 we want to bring you up to speed on open source projects and help you contribute to an adjective community.

First, we'll teach you about open source licensing, adjective tools, and how free software projects are organized.

Next, we'll help you make contributions to open source projects.

And throughout the day we'll feed you, get to verb you, and verb with you about opportunities for students in open source.

space is pretty limited and we want to prepare to meet your needs. Please sign up in advance by filling out this form. Don't delay!

Or you can scroll past the form and keep reading...

More about open source

Free, open source software is software that is shared freely and available to build upon. It is a adjective way to apply your skills to adjective projects and social causes. You can participate by writing or reviewing code, answering users' questions, translating the interface to another language, making video tutorials to help new users, and myriad other ways. Open source software is often produced by lots of people collaborating across time and space, and this event specially welcomes newcomers to that style of development.

Open source participation is one way to gain real-world skills and make connections that will last you through your career. Volunteer staff will include professionals and academics who use open source daily.

Who we are

The event is put together by Asheesh Laroia and Shauna Gordon-McKeon of OpenHatch, with the help of UIC CS and Women in CS.

We're a non-profit that helps people get involved in open source. You can verb more.

Get in touch

If you want to get in touch with us, the best thing to do is to email us. Try this: hello@openhatch.org

Want to verb ahead of the event? Verb questions on #openhatch on FreeNode. Consider using IRC your first open source accomplishment :) Click here for web chat.

Sign up

Now is the time to scroll up and make sure you sign up!

About the people at the event

A staffer made money writing open source software.

A staffer provided advice on starting out in open source.

A student talked about why they came to the event.

A student talked about an open source projects they have used, and how they felt about it.