OpenHatch affiliated projects
What's an 'OpenHatch affiliated project'?
An affiliated project is a free/open source project which is working with OpenHatch to welcome new contributors to their community. Affiliated projects are characterized by a friendly culture and a willingness to do some extra work to make their projects more accessible.
What does an affiliated project do?
To become an affiliated project, you'll need to do two things.
Develop a good project guide
Over time, we've learned that the best projects to recommend to newcomers are those that have clear, thorough guides for newcomers.
We've created a detailed how-to for creating these (see the Open Source Project Guide - #2: Project Setup). The basics that we look for are:
- Contact information for the project as a whole, as well as one or more maintainers who will be OpenHatch's main points of contact.
- An overview of the purpose of the project, as well as its basic structure, tools and technologies.
- A step-by-step guide to installing the project/setting up the development environment.
- A step-by-step guide to making and contributing changes to the project.
If the following seems daunting to produce by yourself, we're happy to facilitate a "set-up sprint" - an IRC meeting (or meetings, as needed) where OpenHatch volunteers attempt to get started with your project. This will allow you to quickly and efficiently handle problems with dependencies, documentation, etc.
Practically speaking, we'll test your setup and documentation ourselves before listing you on our OH-affiliated projects page, so you might as well work with us to get there. We've found that newcomers such as our OSCTC alumni are very well suited to this kind of contribution.
Identify appropriately-sized tasks
Once your project has good documentation, we'll work with you to help identify tasks that new contributors can handle. We call these "Curated First Tasks". A good first task should not require extensive knowledge of the code base to fix, and should be doable relatively quickly. First tasks can be code-based, but don't need to be. Documentation, bug verification, testing, design, translation, and other types of tasks are all very welcome. You can see examples of past curated tasks here.
First tasks are primarily for attendees at Open Source Comes to Campus events, however they will also be advertised to OSCTC alumni and general community members via:
- monthly emails highlighting the available tasks
- monthly open source meetups
- the First Tasks page, which we will be sending newcomers to on a regular basis
Tasks for events should generally be fixable in two hours or less.
You may also be interested in mentoring newcomers as they work on larger tasks. Details.
Other ways to get involved
These are in no way necessary to become an OH-affiliated project, but sure would be neat:
- We are always looking for enthusiastic staff to come to our events. If maintainers or core contributors are interested in volunteering, we'd love to have you! Our attendees have had some wonderful experiences working through bugs with project maintainers sitting right beside them.
List of OpenHatch affiliated projects.
(Coming soon.)