Open Source Day GHC15 - the story as it happened

New: the pictures from the event!

The Open Source Day 2015: 300 participants, 8 organisations, 15 open source humanitarian projects, 4 full hours of coding lead to an amazing open source contribution for humanitarian purposes.

We kicked-off at 10:00, directly after the first keynote of the event. After registration and a short demo everyone was ready to setup their environment and code. Despite the connectivity difficulties during the 12K people conference all the projects have had amazing contributions.

• Microsoft Disaster Response participants coded for helping people all over the world be more resilient and prepared for disasters.
• Systers attendees added new features to vital products for Systers community.
• UProxy (facilitated by UW and Google Ideas) coders submitted solutions to real bugs and added new features to the uProxy app, which is a globally used Privacy and Censorship project.
• OpenHatch participants had the opportunity to explore Github and how to use different tools to contribute to open source projects.
• Mozilla contributors had the chance to directly contribute to the “Mozilla Learning Networks” project to help more people to see themselves as citizens of the web.
• OpenStack participants have experienced working with OpenStack cloud and managed in a very short time to successfully launch application servers.
• Women's P2P Networks open source day coders have successfully contributed to application supporting women in developing countries to become to have a voice in their communities.
• Cloudera participants have contributed significantly to gain data insights for the Bay Area Discovery Museum.

For more information about the Open Source Day projects visit our wiki page.

Raymond Cheng (uProxy) testimony - "Our OSD contributors were incredible, most of whom were first-time contributors to open source. They all set up the same development environment that we use. They all chose real bugs from our issue tracker. They all made great progress and many of them have already submitted their code for review. It is amazing how much these talented engineers got done in one day and I am as excited as they are to see their changes in the next version of uProxy."

We are looking forward to the next Open Source Day event next year. During the GHC we also had a booth organised by Larissa Shapiro, where each org had the chance to reach to all Open Source enthusiasts participating at the conference.

I am proud to have worked across 2 continents with the awesome OSD team of 7 people for 8 month organising this event. Seeing the demos and the amount of features and fixes the participants of the Open Source Day have added to each project gave me a great feeling of achievement.

See you next year!

Get all the pictures from the event here!