What are we talking about?

Making your project more approachable to new contributors: Discuss strategies regarding how to help new contributors get started with your open source project.

Who are we? :)

Chandan Singh

GSoC Student, 2014

Drupal

Student at IIIT H

Angie "webchick" Byron

GSoC Student, 2005

Drupal Org Admin, 2006-2008

Drupal core committer, cat herder

What blocks contributors?

1. Assume they're not skilled enough
2. Assume you need to be a developer to contribute to open source
3. Overwhelmed by size/scale of project
4. Hard to know where to start
5. Other problems?

What blocks contributors?

• Don't know they *can* contribute — where to open bugs, how to do it, what tools?
• "Conduct unbecoming of a Hacker" — Reviews highlighting trivial things detrimental new contributors
1. Mitigate with automated checks
• Tyranny of Structurelessness: People don't know who's who in the project
• Flamewars
• Criticism delivered overly harshly - "full frontal nicety"

http://sealedabstract.com/rants/conduct-unbecoming-of-a-hacker/

What blocks contributors?

1. Gaps between users and contributors
2. Developers are on platform X, users are on platform Y. (Make windows builds accessible!)
3. Avoid "Elite Cabals" — have an onramp for people to join, and/or highlight positions outside of those with tightly controlled access

​

What strategies help?

• Post clear signs on how to start
• Get people together

​

Post clear signs on where to start

"Novice" tag

• Seek out tasks such as documentation bugs, coding standards violations, etc.
• Instead of just fixing, tag it as "Novice" and put a list of them somewhere easy to find
• It might take 5 days (or weeks) for a new contributor to solve, but they'll learn a ton in the process

https://www.drupal.org/novice

Easy page to get started

• Make a "one-stop shop" for contributors to understand how to engage with your project
• Call out *all* types of contribution
• Include detailed steps on how to find/complete tasks, as well as reference material and "what next"

​

https://www.drupal.org/new-contributors

Other suggestions?

• Make a list of "easy" bugs with specific pointers to how to do the work ("code pointers", and identify skills needed "C++", "localization").
• If you're interested in getting involved, submit this form. Hooked up with a "guide" (generally former GSoC students) who corresponds with them on how to get involved.

Other suggestions?

• Generally, make the "ramp up" time as quick as possible:
• Tools to help compiled projects compile faster, auto-set environment variables, etc.
• Ready-made VM with all tools already there
• "One-click" binary with every required library/dependency already there for quick/easy testing.
• Gerritt / CI - automated "technical verified +1" so contributors don't have to know how to set up the test suite.

Other suggestions?

Clear rules on granting/revoking of special privileges (e.g. two patches committed, grant commit access; two builds broken )

Encourage people to review other people's code

• Pair programming with GSoC students to help get them up initial learning curve
• "Ping-pong" between writing tests and code with the other participant

Get people together

Drupal Ladder

• Think about the steps needed to become proficient at something.
• Break them down into lessons, with simple tasks to complete.
• Each lesson provides skills to get to the next lesson.
• "Crowd source" going through the ladder at local user groups.

http://drupalladder.org/

Core Mentoring Hours

• Twice a week on IRC, mentors available to hand-hold new contributors
• Pre-curate issue list with those great for new contributors (both tech and non-tech)
• Help assign issues, answer questions, get dev environments set up

https://www.drupal.org/core-mentoring-hours

DrupalCon Sprints

• Core mentoring hours, but in person. :)
• Start with optional 2 hour intro training on Git, LAMP stack, how issue queue works
• At the end, core maintainer reviews/commits newbie patches LIVE

https://austin2014.drupal.org/sprints

Drupal Dojo

• Like a Drupal "study group"
• Each session, someone talks about something they know about, or something they're struggling with
• "Hangout" type of experience; No expectation of "formal" presentation.

https://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo

Other suggestions?

• Video chat — helps "introduce" new contributors to the main developers in the community
• Elevate the experts so people *know* who to talk to.
• "Make your developers famous" :)
• Put pointers to new contributors in the email signature
• Have "paid insiders" do the "boring" work like documentation, writing test cases, fixing coding standards

Other suggestions?

• If you can write code, considering mentoring others and encouraging them instead
• Post the git commit that was actually fixed so people can see that their change got in, post a "diff" so they understand how their code could be improved.
• "Sandwich" your feedback with nice things. :) beginning/end

http://mumak.net/stuff/your-code-sucks.html

When criticizing, make it constructive.

​