Facilitating and or participating in open source

Facilitating and or participating in open source

⚠️ These are @half-ogre's raw notes from @derickbailey's session. I'll clean these up and make them more coherent later. ⚠️

Intro

• Fell into working on Backbone.
• Fell in love, because it "fit"
• Started blogging and SOing, teaching as he learned
• Blogging led to contracts and work
• Being an "ass" and trying to lead an OSS project will fail
• He had to learn to stop being as much of an ass to grow the Marionette community
• "I stopped being an ass online." Keep IRL.
• Blog post on the problem of OSS leaders not being nice
• Wants this to be a discussion on getting into open source or being an OSS leader

open the circle...

"I don't have a lot of experience, and I'm afraid my work will be crap. How do I start?"

• Ask for help; don't qualify, just ask for help
• Look at other interactions with contributors in the project
• Follow the existing patterns
• Make some intentional, minor mistakes
• Find a way to let people help if they solved problems you're already solving
• Start PRs early
• Don't take thing personally; have a think skin
• Put your own stuff up

"What if I get a PR for something I'm already doing"

• Take the contribution
• Help them get commits in the graph
• If you don't use it, try to help them feel good (thank them, treat me well)
• Put the stuff you're working on, or planning to work on, somewhere others can see it

"What if I get a PR I just don't want"

• Thanks them
• Something positive
• Turn it into a conversation

"How did Marionette explode"

• Not an explosion, just steady growth
• Use Google alerts to track posts
• Tweet their blog posts
• Help drive traffic to them
• Growth because of pulling people in, releasing often, being prompt about PRs
• Don't feel bad about "selling" your OSS

"Documentation is really helpful"

• Make documentation part of your workflow
• Link to documentation on exceptions and error pages/views

"Does brand matter"?

• Not as much as you think
• Think of a searchable name
• Message might be more important - positive better than negative
• Message should speak to the problem being solved
• Reflect the character

"Starting an OSS project or making contributions can be a fun way to learn other languages or platforms, potentially

finding a niche"

"Do OSS stuff that's fun and makes you happy"

"Take extra time to help folks that want to contribute"

"Make fans"

"Be the model of how you want others to behave"

"Be a facilitator, not just an owner"

"Be generous giving commit access"

• Encourages contributions
• Shows trust
• Not really very risky

"Make it easy for contributors to find easy things to do"

• tag issues that anyone can work on
• a list of work anyone can work on
• add incomplete PRs ready for someone else to take