The Unicorn’s Horn is a weekly summary of what we have been up to lately at Mendicant University. It should come in handy for folks who want to keep up with what we are working on, but don’t have time to read each and every one of our updates.
Hi everyone. Here comes another weekly dose of news about Mendicant University!
Vanilla Forums went down for a few hours unexpectedly. This wouldn’t be a big deal, but the whole reason we were experimenting with the forum in the first place is because we wanted something more stable. Still, we don’t see an immediate better option, so we will continue testing it out over the next few weeks.
Anita (our own IRC bot) is working now. Anita makes it easy for us to generate HTML, Markdown, and JSON formatted logs for discussions that happen in the #mendicant channel. The HTML format can probably use some styling love, so please send us a pull request if you’d like!
We held another social gathering in #mendicant channel in freenode. If you’re curious about what we discussed, you can check out this chat transcript.
We held our fourth Global Hack Day on May 17. While some folks hacked on various different projects, for others it provided a convenient time and place to ask some questions about what Mendicant University is all about. Ideas were exhanged, and code was written, so all in all it was a great hack day. You can check out the full transcript for more details.
There will be a town hall meeting dedicated to the topic of Defining Mendicant University’s culture. We plan to use this event to discuss and continue to develop our community guidelines, which are a work-in-progress.
We will continue preparing for our first session on technical writing, which will be taught by Gregory Brown. There is a preliminary assignment for those that want to participate, and submissions are due on May 24.
We will almost certainly offer some free-form office hours, but they have not yet been scheduled. Keep an eye on this website, or follow @mendicant_news if you are interested in participating.
The Mendicant homesteaders will continue to work on whatever needs to be done to make the new Mendicant University a wonderful place to be. In particular, we will continue working on documentation explaining how to get involved, and how our school works.
That’s all the news for this week. Stay tuned for another issue of the Unicorn’s Horn next week and have fun! Go Unicorns!