Like so many Jedi™: BostonJS returns!

That’s right! There Has Been An Awakening™ and now BostonJS is rising like an X-Wing™ fighter from the swamps of Dagobah™!

What. Like you wouldn’t try to get in on some cross-promotional ducats. Like you wouldn’t host a meetup with a plastic light-saber on your belt just to get LucasArts’ attention and maybe a cut of those sweet sponsorship… space credits or whatever. Sorry, “Lightsaber™.”

Bottom line: BostonJS is back, and this swank new office on South Street ain’t cheap. So we are gonna cash in, like Han winning the Millennium Falcon™ from LandOh, what’s this! I’m receiving a, uh, transmission! From a… droid. “Droid™?” Space robot. Look, I don’t know; someone is calling me. Perhaps it is a distress call from Obi-Wan Kenob—! Nope it’s our lawyer—it’s the lawyer; hang on, I gotta take this. Everyone shut up for a second.

…Ahem! So! Team BostonJS has been forc— strongly compelled to stop using certain terms for the remainder of this description. We’ll figure something else out.

Oh right, the new office! Sorry, buried the lede a little there: we’re currently settling into our new home on South Street, complete with a new-and-improved meeting space!

We’re still lining up speakers —there will be speakers, of course, and they are listed below—but we’re also gonna start things up a little earlier than usual for some informal meet-and-greet and open mic time—so be here at 6:30 to hang out before the talks kick off at 7:15.

We hope you’ll join us on Thursday, March 3rd, as we… Boldly go where no BostonJS has gone before!™

(Call us, Paramount Pictures!) 

Creating Inviting Communities
Gregor Martynus (twitter | github)

JavaScript communities, be it around open source projects, meetups or conferences, have a tradition of being very welcoming and invested into growing their contributors and maintainers, both in quantity and diversity.

But how does it work? How to bring people together who would love to participate but often don’t know how on the one side, and maintainers who appreciate every kind of contribution on the other? There seems to be a big gap, because if there is one thing we learned at <a>Hoodie</a> & the JS Conf family, both sides exist, but we are still figuring out how to close the gap.

In this talk, I’ll talk about what works for Hoodie, and how people perceive us as [“one of the most diverse and inclusive  [Open Source] communities”], without the code part being even ready :) Expect a lot of practical tips that will help you contribute to open source (with so much more than just code), and how to maintain and grow your own projects without loosing the fun and burning yourself out.

Name-your-contributors: A node module for fostering community by including everyone who helps
Richard Littauer (website | twitter | github)

Great coding projects and great communities are linked; but building a great community takes a good deal of work. I've built a tool to help with one aspect; praising contributors. `name-your-contributors` names everyone who has interacted on GitHub - not just with code, but also with comments, code review, or issue creation. I use it currently in weekly emails for the IPFS team, and will like to talk about it's reception, it's development, and how to get other communities using it, too.

Building communities with social scientific software at Public Lab
Jeff Warren (website | twitter | github)

Public Lab's approach of using socially-oriented web-based software for scientific analysis is part of its broader move to recast environmental research as something that's done in public, by the public. By making a website with user profiles, comments, and Git-style forking the center of the data collection and analysis process, Public Lab creates on-ramps for new users, encourages peer support and troubleshooting, and builds a culture of remixing and replication. This has evolved in parallel with a move towards JS-based, client-side processing of data using emerging web standards such as WebRTC, CSS3, and other HTML5 features.