Hackergartens help promote contributions to open source projects

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Eric LEFEVRE-ARDANT 

Devoxx, the premier conference on the Java ecosystem in Europe, was one of the best I’ve been to recently. One session, a Hackergarten, introduced by Hamlet D’Arcy, was particularly interesting.

The general idea was to turn participants into committers on open source projects. Here is how it works in practice:

• each committer advertizes his/her own project and possible features to be implemented during the session
• each participant joins a project
• committers do their best to get participants up to speed
• participants do their best to contribute something before the end of the session

The session took some 3 hours. This seems to be fairly optimal, as many (although not all) participants did manage to commit code within that timeframe.

In a traditional lecture in a conference, the interest of a speaker is to make herself look good and the attendees be entertained. Making sure that they remember much is only a secondary goal, and, in truth, it is difficult for the speaker to ensure much will be understood and remembered.

In comparison, it strikes me is that a Hackgarten is a particularly healthy exercice. Both current projects contributors and participants are working towards the same goal: the former because they want to have more committers and promote their pet projects, and the latter because they want to be part of a more advanced community of developers. It is in the interest of the contributors to make sure the participants are up and running as quickly as possible, so that they stay involved for a long time.

Sounds interesting? It turns out that Hackergartens are organized on a regularly basis. Check out the official Hackergarten website for news.

I also heard rumors of a Hackgarten being organized in Paris in early 2011. Watch this space, as we are sure to relay the information on this blog.

Read more on the Hackergarten event at Devoxx on JetBrains’ blog (including a couple of pictures).

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