It’s a little hard to believe, but the Free Software Foundation (FSF)’s 40th anniversary free software hackathon is almost upon us. From 10:00 EST on November 21 through 10:00 EST November 23,we will work on six different free software projects. Here’s how to get involved in this weekend’s festivities and leave your mark on one of the participating projects.
Participating projects
The first step to contributing (we’re excited you’re here!) is to choose a project that you’d like to get involved with during the hackathon. Most participating projects will have at least one task intended for non-programmers, so if you don’t know a programming language or have documentation skills, you can still participate!
The full list of participating projects is as follows:
- The Free Software Directory, the FSF’s free software catalog;
- GNU Boot, a boot software distribution that can replace nonfree boot software like BIOS or UEFI on specific computers;
- GNU Chalk, a reproducible package manager;
- Atmosphere, an interactive platform to learn African writing systems;
- on-mattermost, OpenProject integration for Mattermost; and
- Org Mode, the notes management and organizer for GNU Emacs.
Registration
If you haven’t already registered for the project(s) you’ve chosen, we ask that you register for the hackathon so that we can give the mentors one last count of how many people thay should expect to drop in over the weekend. Registering doesn’t just help the maintainers of Guix, Lewa, and the rest know how many people to expect: it also gives us here at the FSF a good idea of how effective initiatives like this one are.
To register, you’ll need an FSF account. You do not need to be an FSF associate member to participate. Account registration and hackathon registration are gratis.
Please also familiarize yourself with the FSF’s safe space policy before participating in the hackathon or any FSF40 event.
Where to go
Following the FSF’s introduction in the hackathon-general Galene room at 10:00 EST on Friday morning, the best way of finding out where to go to participate for a given project is to join #fsf-hackathon on the Libera.chat IRC network, which we’ll be using for basic coordination over the weekend. Links for each project’s Galene videoconferencing
Worth a look