OpenHatch: An Open Source Volunteer Opportunity Finder

Google Tech Talk April 29, 2010 ABSTRACT Presented by Asheesh Laroia and Raphael Krut-Landau. Hacking in the open source community isn't always warm fuzzies for everyone. Sometimes the process is just plain confusing. How do you find something rewarding to work on? Inevitable obstacles stand in between you and your desire to improve the software you use. In this talk we discuss our attempt to rethink how the open source community is organized - a website called OpenHatch.org. Learn about bitesize bugs, the volunteer opportunity finder, and the "I want to help" button. What are your thoughts on the process of taking part in open source? Whether you're a total open source beginner or a veteran, we'd love to hear what Googlers think. Asheesh Laroia is the lead engineer and data seducer at OpenHatch, and writes things down at asheesh.org. Before founding OpenHatch in 2009, he was a software engineer at Creative Commons. Raphael Krut-Landau also helped found OpenHatch, and is what is often called a user experience architect, although that is a bit much. They did all their higher education at Johns Hopkins University, and between them they have two B.A.'s in cognitive science, an M.S.E. in computer science (Asheesh's), and a heap of unread books on philosophy (Raphael's).