Hi folks, Stefano's post on how to make contributions to OpenStack easier [1] finally stirred me into writing about something that vkmc and myself have been doing on the side for a few months to help new contributors to get involved.
Some of you may be aware of OpenHatch [2], a non-profit dedicated to helping newcomers get started in open-source. About 6 months ago we created a project page for Horizon [3], filled in a few high level details, set ourselves up as mentors. Since then people have been expressing interest in the project and a number of them got a patch submitted and approved, a couple are sticking around (often helping out with bug triaging, as confirming new bugs is one of the few tasks one can help out with when only having limited time). I can definitely sympathise with the comment in Stefano's article that there are not enough easy tasks / simple issues for newcomers. There's a lot to learn already when you're starting out (git, gerrit, python, devstack, ...) and simple bugs are so hard to find - something that will take a few minutes to an existing contributor will take much longer for someone who's still figuring out where to get the code from. Unfortunately it's not uncommon for existing contributors to take on tasks marked as "low-hanging-fruit" because it's only 5 minutes (I can understand this coming up to an RC but otherwise low-hanging-fruits are often low priority nits that could wait a little bit longer). In Horizon the low-hanging-fruits definitely get snatched up quickly and I try to keep a list of typos or other low impact, trivial bugs that would make good first tasks for people reaching out via OpenHatch. OpenHatch doesn't spam, you get one email a week if one or more people indicated they want to help. The initial effort is not time-consuming, following OpenHatch's advice [4] you can refine a nice "initial contact" email that helps you get people started and understand what they are interested in quickly. I don't find the time commitment to be too much so far, and it's incredibly gratifying to see someone submitting their first patch after you answered a couple of questions or helped resolve a hairy git issue. I'm happy to chat about it more, if you're curious or have any questions. In any case if you'd like to attract more contributors to your project, and/or help newcomers get started in open-source, consider adding your project to OpenHatch too! Cheers, Julie [1] http://opensource.com/business/14/2/analyzing-contributions-to-openstack [2] http://openhatch.org/ [3] http://openhatch.org/+projects/OpenStack%20dashboard%20%28Horizon%29 [4] https://openhatch.org/wiki/Contacting_new_contributors _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
