fostering community

Fostering CommunityKaren Tracey

DjangoCon Europe 2012

Why?

• Django's community is one of its greatest assets

• Everyone can contribute

• Everyone can benefit

Who am I?

Programmer since forever

Crossword puzzle constructor since 2001

Cat rescuer since 2009

My Django story begins in 2006

• Django open-sourced a year earlier

• 0.95 just released, "dozens of contributors"

• Five core developers

Puzzle database

• Aid in constructing puzzles, accessible from construction tool

• Amassed over ~5 years

• ~5,000 puzzles, ~100,000 unique entries, ~500,000 clues

Problem: limited access to data

Project: web front-end for database

• Primary goal: better ability to "see" data

• Secondary goal: learn Python

Survey: Python web frameworks

• Django?

• Turbogears?

• Pylons?

Snag: my weird database

1 class Entrie(models.Model):2 Entry ID = models.IntegerField(primary_key=True)3 Entry = models.CharField(blank=True, unique=True, maxlength=150)4 class Meta:5 db_table = 'Entries'

Concern

django-users to the rescue!

My first ticket and patch

• Ticket #2517 opened 9:53:14AM

• 4-line patch

• Patch, 50% modified, committed by Adrian at 9:58:27AM

• Name added to AUTHORS

Sadness

• Probably never happens today

• Needs test!

• Balance stability with wow-factor

Github to the rescue?

Back to the mailing list post

• Hesitant to sign my name

• Open source has bad rep w.r.t treatment of women

• Confident of technical ability

• ...but conscious I didn't know much about web programming

• Would I get more respect if I didn't reveal my name?

Plea: encourage women

• Women actively discouraged from participating in open source communities

• Please don't join in bad behavior

• Speak out against it when you see it

Yes, we need more women

Back to my story...

My mailing list participation

Why did I become so active?

• Learn more about Django

• Improve communication skills

• Help people

• Puzzles!

• Long-range goal: get a job

What did Django community gain?

• Lots of triage/bugfixes prior to 1.0

• Some features/bugfixes since 1.0

• Helped many people learn Django

What did I gain?

• Became core committer in 2008

• Asked to write a book in 2009 (published 2010)

• Got a great job in 2010

Get involved!(You already are)

• Community events, big or small

• Mailing lists

• IRC

• Stack overflow

• Ticket triage

• Bug fixes

• Feature development

• Patch review

• Blogs

Image credits

• Venn Diagram: "User" and "Community", from The Noun Project collection

• IBM PC: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_PC_5150.jpg

• Helicopter rescue: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rescue.jpg

• Fireworks: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OperaSydney-Fuegos2006-342289398.jpg

• Mask: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Doctor-0001.jpg

• Superman Octocat: http://octodex.github.com/images/okal-eltocat.jpg, by Cameron Mcefee

• Coffee cups #1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discrimination-Diversity-01.jpg

• Coffee cups #2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Discrimination-Diversity-02.jpg

• Story book: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chatterwell_Stories_3.jpg

• Sprout, from The Noun Project

• Liftoff: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1994_s64_Liftoff.jpg

• Teaching: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alice_Hamilton_in_an_anatomy_class.jpg

• Others my own