Meetups

Introducing the Open(source).athon in NYC

The Hacks/Hackers NYC is throwing an open(source).athon in the OpenPlans penthouse on Oct 2 to see how much great software for news/information we can open source in 12 hours?

If you are a hacker, bring your code and get the time and some help to push it out the door (Or bring your expertise and help others). If you are a hack, we need excellent writers and editors to help with documentation. This is a great opportunity to learn about the world of open source.

Every journo-nerd has a project they know is worth open sourcing, and that only needs documentation, or to be unbaked from a CMS, or generalized in some semi-trivial way, before they can finally push it out to a public github repo.

Maybe they just haven’t found the time. Or maybe they need a little help. Or maybe they have questions: What license should I use? How should I write my docs and structure my code so strangers can figure out how they should be contributing code? How can I release this so anybody notices and cares?

Hear about Open Source best practices from Jeremy Ashkenas, lead developer at DocumentCloud and author of popular open source projectsUnderscore.js and CoffeeScript.

Get free licensing advice from the Software Freedom Law Center, authors of the GPL.

Caffeine, pizza, and snacks will be provided, courtesy of the Knight Foundation. Participants will receive a schwag bag including a copy of Karl Fogel’s “Producing Open Source Software,” published by O’Reilly, and a snazzy t-shirt designed by us. Prizes TBA.

The view from the penthouse at OpenPlans is amazing. It’s just a great place to make things happen.

We don’t want the $25 to be a deterrent. If you need a waiver, email us at nyc at hackshackers dot com, and you can volunteer for Hacks/Hackers at some point.

Also if you want to hold your own Open(source).athon, please email us! We want these events to spread.

10 LET KARMA = KARMA + 1

20 PRINT KARMA

30 GOTO 10

How much great software for news/information can we open source in 12 hours?

If you are a hacker, bring your code and get the time and some help to push it out the door. (Or bring your expertise and help others) If you are a hack, we need excellent writers and editors to help with documentation. This is a great opportunity to learn about the world of open source.