Public Lab Research note


Getting people involved in OSS

by sashadev-sky | December 09, 2019 05:40 09 Dec 05:40 | #21699 | #21699

(As demonstrated by Public Lab)


* Badges: README badges - you can't miss them. Some community-oriented badges are first-timers-only friendly, code of conduct, chat in different ways, newcomers welcome, and the contributions welcome badge.

* Bots: Welcome bot especially.

* Chatroom: have a chatroom, for example a Gitter community.

* Cloud installation: add support for cloud installation. They are platform agnostic, and downloading software isn't a requirement to contribute.

* Code community survey: send out an optional, anonymous survey to your contributors at the end of the year to learn what works for them and what doesn't.

* Code of conduct: just required.

* Community Check-in: have a weekly community check-in via a Github issue. Encourage any contributors to take the lead for the next week and open it.

* Contribution model: implement a non-technical contributing workflow that sets the tone throughout your community. (See this post's main image).

* Contributor credit: in releases, on your README, - wherever.

* Contributors welcome page

* Emojis: they're friendly.

* FTOs: (labels - good first issue, first-timers-only).

* Gitpod: online IDE which simplifies code contributions and reviews by fully automating the dev setup. - Provides free open source plans!

* Groups: collaboratively manage a repository, each focused in on a specific feature. Ex:

  • core-maintainers
  • ui-maintainers
  • tests-maintainers
  • module-maintainers

* Issue labels: other useful issue labels: add code links, help wanted

* Noble cause: choose a cause people want to get behind.

* Open Hour: a community call scheduled monthly or weekly.

* OSS Programs: participate in OSS programs (Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC), Outreachy, Google Code-In (GCI), and more).

* Social Media: provide way for contributors to connect to your organization. Public Lab uses Twitter to thank new contributors for their 1st PR if they provide their Twitter handle.

* Supportive Tasks: Public Lab's supportive tasks improve the quality of issues for newcomers, encourage a cycle of reciprocity in the community, and engage non-code contributors. Amongst other things.

* Teams: more broad than groups, contributors take on specific roles across the whole community. Ex:

  • @publiclab/support
  • @publiclab/mentors

* Templates: make it easy for new contributors to follow your community conventions and workflow with pull request and issue templates.


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