Day 5: How to expand our development community?

[jaye]

The code alone doesn’t cause this to happen. As in the proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child,” it takes a community to create a healthy open source project. All participants in an open-source ecosystem have the opportunity to shape and improve the software. Users can identify features they need, and contribute code upstream. Everyone has a chance to make a difference.

We at SEF now have a significant amount of contributors in our community. We can do more great things by expanding it. Today, the challenge is to share one essential thing we can do to expand our community.

I’ll start with a simple one.

Make people feel welcome

One way to think about your project’s community is through what Mike Mc Quaid calls the contributor funnel:

As we build our community, we need to consider how someone at the top of the funnel (a potential user) might theoretically make their way to the bottom (an active maintainer). Our goal is to reduce friction at each stage of the contributor experience. When people have easy wins, they will feel incentivized to do more.

Start with documentation:

• Make it easy for someone to use our project. A friendly README and clear code examples will make it easier for anyone who lands on our project to get started.
• Clearly explain how to contribute, using your CONTRIBUTING file and keeping the issues up-to-date.
• Good first issues: To help new contributors get started, we need to consider explicitly labeling issues that are simple enough for beginners to tackle. GitHub will then surface these issues in various places on the platform, increasing useful contributions, and reducing friction from users tackling issues that are too hard for their level.

We can use these interactions as opportunities to move them down the funnel.

• When someone new lands on our project, thank them for their interest! It only takes one negative experience to make someone not want to come back.
• Be responsive. If we don’t respond to their issue for a month, chances are, they’ve already forgotten about your project.
• Be open-minded about the types of contributions you’ll accept. Many contributors start with a bug report or a small fix. There are many ways to contribute to a project. We should let people help how they want to help.
• If there’s a contribution we disagree with, we should thank them for their idea and explain why it doesn’t fit into the scope of the project, linking to relevant documentation if we have it.

I nominate @akshika47

[akshika47]

Clearly defining mission and vision of the community

By doing this you give the community a purpose to work for and people who contribute would have a better understanding and self-satisfaction when contributing. This would allow us to have a set of developers who would stick with us in the long term.

I nominate @Gravewalker

[Gravewalker]

Using social media platforms to reach out to new contributors
We can use social media platforms as a channel to guide enthusiasts on our projects. Just by tweeting or sharing our GitHub link on the bottom of the posts where we talk about our projects we can find more people to contribute to our projects.
I nominate @Yohan

[Yohan]

Motivate the contributors by giving some rewards

We can motivate contributors by giving some rewards like swags or badges for their commitments.
because of that people of outside the community are motivate for contribute to our projects as well as we can spread our community.
I nominate @anjisvj

[anjisvj]

Creating leaderboard for contributors
We can create a leaderboard with contributors by their contributions. It will motivate them to compete with other contributors. This will help to keep contributors with us for a longer time.
I nominate @piumal1999

[piumal1999]

Create impressive projects and contents

We can make our projects more impressive for the new contributors to expand the development community. As an example, if we can create a popular open source app which is related to sustainable education we can get a huge community.

I nominate @janithRS