Join us for Docker Birthday and Open-Source-a-thon to support whales and marine wildlife

Victor Coisne
Mar 5 2015

Two weeks ago, we proudly announced the organization of a global open-source-a-thon to celebrate the Docker project’s 2nd birthday. Today, we’re excited to share more details around the event series and how you can participate.

2-years

During the week of March 23rd, the docker community will be hosting over a dozen open-source-a-thon parties around the world. At these parties the Docker core team and expert developers from the Go community will teach and guide participants on how to contribute to open source.

Contributions to the project at these events and in the weeks following will count toward our donation to the Oceanic Society and its mission to conserve the habitat of Moby Dock and blue whales across the planet.

We invite everyone with even the smallest desire to be a part open source or people who just want to help out with a great cause to attend regardless of technical experience. We will have Docker core team members at each event as well as experts from both the Docker and Go communities to mentor and teach people how to write Go (the language Docker is written in) and contribute to Docker.

While we hope to get many contributions in the form of code, we expect many more contributions from participants in other forms including documentation, tutorials, videos, artwork, organization, answering questions and mentoring at the events themselves. Regardless of your experience, you can contribute and make a difference.

In addition to the in person events we will also be hosting an online open-source-a-thon the following week (details to come).

This event is thanks to the many wonderful people throughout the world who contribute their time and talents to open source. This includes our awesome meetup organizers who, without their efforts this would not be possible.

March 23rd

March 24th

March 25th

March 26th

Local event structure:

Every event will kick off with a short presentation by the Docker team members and mentors who will provide a quick overview on the open source process and how to get started.

At each local Docker meetup, attendees will then split into 3 groups based on how they’d like to get involved:

Non-code contributions
First time contributions (either new to Go or Docker
Advanced Code contributions (advanced users are encouraged to mentor #2 as well

Each group will have dedicated mentors to help everyone get up and running with contributions no matter how knowledgeable they are with Go or Docker. The Docker Core team has been hard at work improving every aspect of the contributor experience including writing a comprehensive contributor guide, sorting through hundreds of issues, labelling issues with complexity levels, refining the pull request review process, and more. We’ll be sharing more details on how to contribute at each event.

Stay connected with the other Docker contributors around the World

During the day the Docker team and larger community will be online answering your questions and helping you tackle some of the challenges associated with the GitHub issues, PRs, or contributions you’ve decided to work on. We will be setting up a “beginner contributor” IRC channel so everyone will feel comfortable asking for help. The official hashtag for the event is #dockerbday. You can also follow us on Twitter to receive news real-time during the day.

For all who attend or participate in the local events, we’re also working on a special, limited-edition t-shirts and stickers to be given away at each location!

We hope you’re as excited as we’re by this opportunity to contribute to open source, meet each other, write some Go code and save some whales!

If you have any question about this open-source-a-thon / birthday parties, please email us or ping us on Twitter.

Big thanks and shout out to our sponsors for offering venues, food and drinks to all the participants and most importantly the opportunity to contribute to open source while helping preserve marine wildlife and oceans!