Open Source Contribution and You (Part 1): Attract Audience To Your Projects

As technology advances, many products and services are being open sourced, encouraging collaboration, transparency, and community building. As the owner or maintainer of an open source project, it can be challenging to attract contributors to your project, especially if they are unfamiliar with the open source workflow. This article provides helpful tips to help you attract contributors to your project.

Tips for attracting contributors to your Open Source Project

Open source projects thrive on people's contributions. Therefore, the success of the project depends on attracting contributors.

Here are a few tips to help you attract contributors to your project.

Define Your Project Details

ReadMe file

Your ReadMe file serves as a "how-to" guide for contributors, which should explain how to navigate through your project. The details of your project must be understandable to your contributors.

These details include:

• What your project entails
• The purpose of creating the project
• Its intended users
• Its application areas
• Project features
• The technologies used

All the details above should be included in your ReadMe file.

Contribution guidelines

Your project should have a contribution guideline that clearly states the ways and processes by which people can contribute to your project. Making this document understandable will save you a lot of time. A well-written Contributing.md file should describe the workflow to contribute to your project. Try adding links to tutorials or screenshots for each of these processes for newcomers.

Issues

Provide a list of clearly defined issues that are easily accessible to new contributors. Make it easy for them to get started by labelling issues that don't require extensive knowledge of the project as "good first issues".

Enhance your Project’s Visibility

Add topics to your repository

Topics related to your project's intended purpose, subject area, and other important features should be included in your repository to make it easier for people to discover and engage with your project. Your project has a greater chance of appearing in GitHub topics when people search for projects through them. Topics appear on the right side of the GitHub repository. You can add topics to your project by clicking the settings icon and editing the repository details.

Label issues appropriately

Labelling issues makes it easier to find issues that can serve as a starting point for contributing. Label your issues with more specific terms such as good first issue, beginner friendly, help wanted, etc. to highlight the fact that the issue is easy enough for an initial contribution.

Promote your Project

Another way to get people involved in your project is to tell them about it. Talk about your project on social media, at conferences, in community channels, in blog posts, at open source hackathons, etc.

Conferences

During these conferences or speaking events, explain what you are building, why you are building it, how you tackled issues through the project, what you learned from the project and how it can help others.

Blog

Use platforms like; Hashnode, Medium, dev.to, or your blog to share facts about your project.

Social Media

(Twitter Spaces/ Tweets/ Podcasts/ Community Channels)

Tweet about your project. Request to speak on Twitter spaces or podcasts. When you get the chance, modestly share information about your project.

Open Source Hackathons and Programs

There are several open source hackathons and programs that you can participate in as a maintainer like; Contributhon, Open Jam, Hacktoberfest etc. For example; Hacktoberfest which is a month-long event usually in October encourages the use of the hacktoberfest label which can boost the visibility of your project and inspire people to make their contributions.

Make your Project Scalable

Scalability in this context means that your project should adapt to a large number of users or contributors with ease. As soon as you begin to get contributors, it may become difficult to keep up with every pull request or issue. Automating the tedious tasks to save time like; using GitHub Actions to handle the release process, enabling self–assigning issues, style checking etc. will help your project improve its scalability.

Make Communication Accessible

The open source community relies heavily on communication, and these channels ensure that contributors can ask questions and be heard. Your communication channels must be easily accessible and flexible. Be considerate of contributors from different time zones by not limiting yourself to one form of communication.

Present Quality Code and Documentation

The quality of the code and documentation is often one of the determining factors for participation in a project, as are the interests of the contributors. Contributors tend to overlook a project that is not properly presented, even if it piques their interest. To avoid this, maintain high-quality documentation and well-written and structured code.

Recognize and encourage Participation

Encouraging participation must be frequent and done with enthusiasm. Recognizing and rewarding good contributions is an excellent way to raise spirits among contributors. If there are unacceptable contributions, respond kindly and educate the contributor. A negative response would discourage contributors from contributing to your project.

Show you contributors gratitude in the form of recognition or rewards. A good place to start is to create a list of contributors on your project website and/or in the project archive. You can reward contributors with swags, stickers, or a mention in a blog post or on social media. This shows them that their contributions are valued and encourages them to contribute more.

Always Keep Your Project Active

Keep your project active, even if no one contributes. Contributions are usually made to projects that have a recent activity.

Conclusion

You will need patience and persistence to find contributors to your open source project, so do not give up. In the meantime, promote your project through blog posts, tweets, organizing Twitter spaces, etc. Finally, when you have contributors to your project and can not think of any new features, set up ways to make it easier to manage and scale your project.

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