Docker Project Announces Open-Source-a-thon to Support Whale and Marine Wildlife Conservation

Partnering with Oceanic Society to link open source contributions to driving “blue” conservation

SAN FRANCISCO – February 19, 2015 – The Docker Project, the open platform for distributed applications, today announced it will be organizing an open-source-a-thon where Docker core team members will teach and mentor people in how to contribute to open source. Contributions include code, documentation, tutorials, videos, and mentoring. Each contribution to the Docker Project will also support the Oceanic Society and its mission to conserve oceans. The program is timed to coincide with the project’s 2nd birthday and is focused on a cause – ocean and marine life health – that is important to its millions of users. Docker’s logo, Moby Dock, is a blue whale that was contributed and selected by its community. The charitable program starts on March 23 and will span a total of five weeks; part of the proceeds will go towards the adoption and naming of a female blue whale soon to be known as “Molly Dock.”

The unnamed blue whale (soon to be named Molly Dock) known to researchers as #763 was first encountered on 30 August 1992 near the Farallon Islands which are found about 25 nautical miles west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge by researcher John Calambokidis. John noted that this whale had an unusually curved dorsal, making her easier to identify in the future. Since the first encounter in 1992 the blue whale # 763 has been encountered 74 times, with the most recent and northernmost sighting occurring off Crescent City, California on 9 November 2013. Researchers determined that #763 was a female when she was encountered with a calf about 6 nautical miles west of San Miguel Island on 25 July 2001. About 10 years later on 06 Mar 2011 # 763 was encountered with another calf in the Gulf of California. The calf (ID # 2831) clearly survived its first few months, for over the 2011 field season the mother-calf pair was encountered in the Santa Barbara Channel (21 June) and again off L.A.’s Long Beach (9 October).

“We are thrilled to partner with the Docker community on this novel open-source-a-thon,” said Roderic Mast, president and CEO of the Oceanic Society. “Docker’s commitment to ocean health is admirable, and the program brilliantly brings the power of open source technology to bear in helping conserve the oceans and help at-risk whale populations.”

The Oceanic Society endeavors to create a more oceanic society by engaging people through whale-watching and international eco-tourism, as well as marine mammal research and field programs designed to empower coastal communities to protect their marine resources. Oceanic Society has created life-changing experiences in nature for tens of thousands of people since 1969, and has contributed to ocean conservation globally. The Docker open-source-a-thon will be focused on fundraising for two of their major programs:

“Blue Habits,” a program recently launched by Oceanic Society in partnership with Stanford University behavioral scientists to determine best practices for motivating lasting pro-ocean behaviors. Blue Habits seeks to convert environmental awareness into conservation action on a broad scale, beginning with Oceanic Society’s Bay Area whale-watching community.

Oceanic Society’s Blackbird Caye Field Station in Belize, where marine mammal and coral reef experts from around the world are helping to monitor and understand dolphins, manatees, and other keystone species to help protect the Turneffe Atoll Marine Reserve that lies at the heart of the Meso-american reef biome — the most significant coral reef and coastal complex in the Americas.

Docker and the Oceanic Society will be providing further education on the risks faced by marine wildlife, including the threat of container ships to the whale population, at events surrounding Docker’s second birthday starting the week of March 15h. These events and activities will celebrate and acknowledge the unparalleled achievements by the Docker community which has forged one of the fastest growing open source projects ever in under 24 months, which includes 770+ contributors creating software for millions of users that have done over 200 million container downloads and created nearly 100K Dockerized applications.

The first week of the open-source-a-thon will include direct global outreach from Docker’s core maintainers to provide hands-on tutorials for showing developers how to contribute most effectively. These events will be done in conjunction with the Go community–Docker is the most popular open source project written in Go–and will be done in nearly 20 cities around the world and will have an online component as well.

Contributions from the “opening week” of the program and follow-on contributions over the subsequent four weeks will be calculated and the final donation will be made. One contribution equates to a $50 donation, and an additional $50 will be added to the “Molly Dock fund” for those that wish to continue to contribute.

“Moby Dock is a widely recognized symbol for the open source project – with a presence on t-shirts and laptops across the globe – it is only fitting to see the community support the Oceanic Society and its programs to fight whale endangerment and more broadly protect the oceans;” said Steve Francia, chief of operations of the Docker project. We are excited to be working with our contributors, old and new, to shine a light on this great organization and their efforts. We are thrilled to have the open-source-a-thon provide another amazing opportunity for the Docker ecosystem to work together for a great cause.”

If you are interested in participating in the open-source-a-thon, please visit docker.party for more details and to register.

Learn More

About Oceanic Society

Oceanic Society aims to deepen the connections between people and Nature, diminish the perception of human separation from Nature, and foment measurable human behavior changes that will conserve the world’s oceans. Through programs that engage people through first-hand experiences in nature, to field research on dolphins and manatees in Belize, to community-based conservation programs from Mexico to Melanesia, and a global-scale open source programs to protect endangered sea turtles, they strive to create a more oceanic society. For more information on the Oceanic Society, please visit: http://www.oceanicsociety.org/.

About Docker, Inc.

Docker, Inc. is the company behind the Docker open source platform, and is the chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem. Docker is an open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship, run and orchestrate distributed applications. With Docker, IT organizations shrink application delivery from months to minutes, frictionlessly move workloads between data centers and the cloud, and improve infrastructure efficiency by 50 percent or more. Inspired by an active community and by transparent, open source innovation, Docker has been downloaded 200+ million times and is used by thousands of the world’s most innovative organizations, including eBay, Baidu, Yelp, Spotify, Yandex, and Cambridge HealthCare. Docker’s rapid adoption has catalyzed an active ecosystem, resulting in more than 95,000 Dockerized applications and integration partnerships with AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Rackspace, Red Hat and VMware.

Docker, Inc. is venture backed by AME Cloud Ventures (Yahoo! Founder Jerry Yang), Benchmark (Peter Fenton), Greylock Partners (Jerry Chen), Insight Venture Partners (Jerry Murdock), Sequoia Capital (Bill Coughran), SV Angel (Ron Conway), Trinity Ventures (Dan Scholnick), Y Combinator.