Onboard not only new contributors

2023-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

This topic was presented during the OpenInfra Summit in Vancouver, June 13-15, 2023. If you want to revisit the slides, go here, below you can find the summary of the key takeaways and some additional content we weren’t able to fit into the presentation.

Summary

There is less contributors around than we were used to.
3 most common obstacles preventing people from contributing to upstream:
1. “no time”
2. not knowing where to start
3. not knowing where to find a suitable task.
71% of people who don’t contribute upstream regularly would appreciate a pool of ‘first issue’ tasks
Decrase the friction for contributors - make it easy and visible by creating a pool of tasks of lower difficulty (good for first time contributors)
Rules the pool of tasks (maybe not only easier ones) should follow these rules to gain the most out of it:
1. Well documented - any relevant content (steps to reproduce, etc) so that anyone who takes a look at the task understands what is going on there - even someone who hasn’t worked with that project before.
2. Definition of Done - a set of conditions if met the work is considered done.
3. Mentor (e.g. a core member) - someone with good knowledge about the project has to be notified on any questions, patches to review etc
4. Quick response time from both - mentor and assignee (one of the obstacles is ‘no time’)
In upstream we already use low-hanging-fruit tag on Launchpad - let’s build on top of that by making sure all tasks marked as such follow the 4 rules mentioned above.

Additional content

For more about forming habbits see Atomic Habits by James Clear.

For around 45% people attending the summit it’s their first summit - what we can read from that is that we might have many new people around. This group of people would benefit from the pool of easier tasks - they could easily catch up.

It’s been proved that puttering around may help with burnout.

Glossary

putter around - “To move from place to place, doing trivial, random, or aimless tasks or activities.” source

Slides

Link to the slide deck

Articles

Our articles written on this topic:

TBA soon

Authors

Martin Kopec Email LinkedIn

Lukáš Piwowarski Email LinkedIn

Martin’s Content