1.
Contributing to Open
Source
Chrissy Wainwright

2.
About Me
@cdw9
Senior Python
Developer at Six Feet
Up, Inc in Indiana
(I work from home in NWA)
Plone Foundation
Board of Directors

3.
What is Open Source?
Product code that is publicly available
Free as in speech, not as in beer
GPL, MIT, BSD Licensing
Repositories in GitHub, Bitbucket, etc
Communities - Python, Django, Plone, etc

4.
Myths
You have to be a developer to contribute
You have to already be involved in the project
You have to speak fluent English
You have to be an expert to contribute code

5.
Pre-requisites
Have a computer
Speak some English, at least in world-wide
communities
Git (in most cases)

6.
Ways to Contribute
- Difficulty level
- may require Git
- requires writing code

7.
Ways to Contribute
Verifying Bugs
Go through reported bugs in the issue tracker,
and check that you can reproduce them.
Ask questions to the requestor if they didn’t
leave enough information
• What operating system?
• What version of the software?
• Provide screenshots
• What was the full error message?

8.
Ways to Contribute
Ticket Triage
• Add tags
• Assign tickets or tag a person to get their
attention
• Link to related issues
• Close if invalid, with a comment

9.
Ways to Contribute
Answering Questions
Community forum, Stack Overflow, IRC

10.
Ways to Contribute
Beta Testing
Try out the beta, release candidate, or soft
release version of the product to make sure
everything is still working

11.
Ways to Contribute
Documentation
• end user documentation
• core and custom development documentation
• training material, tutorials

12.
Ways to Contribute
Translations
• Adding new available languages
• Needed in-product, in documentation and
training/tutorials
• Upkeep on existing languages

13.
Ways to Contribute
Editing, Fixing Typos
• Updating docs from ESL writer
• Glaring typos
• Incorrect or missing instructions

14.
Ways to Contribute
Writing Code
• May need to sign a contributor agreement
• Beginner tasks
• Bug fixes
• New features
• Back-end, front-end

15.
Ways to Contribute
Working at a conference
booth
Talk to people about the product you love!

16.
Ways to Contribute
Board of Directors
Most people don’t like to attend meetings.
Does require some time spent in the community
first

17.
Ways to Contribute
Various Teams
• Marketing
• Framework
• User Interface
• Membership
• Security
• Testing & Continuous Integration
• Installers
• Sysadmins

18.
Ways to Contribute
Make your own project!
It’s a great way to help you understand the
process

19.
How to Get Involved

20.
How to Get Involved
Don’t be afraid
of failure!

21.
How to Get Involved
Community Forum
• Introduce yourself!
• Ask some questions
• Answer some questions
• Get involved in discussions

22.
Pull Requests
Fix some stuff, commit some code!
Not all features will be accepted.
How to Get Involved

23.
How to Get Involved
Attend a Conference
Meet other people who work on and use the
product face-to-face

24.
How to Get Involved
Find a Mentor
• Required on Improvement Proposals
• Hire a company to provide mentoring/training
• Just ask

25.
How to Get Involved
Google Summer of Code,
Code-in
• Gets students involved in OS projects
• Plone has had many GSOC students continue to
stay involved and do great things

26.
How to Get Involved
Finding Projects
• https://github.com/dashboard/discover
• https://www.codetriage.com
• https://github.com/collections/choosing-
projects
• https://dev.to

27.
Where/When contributions
can be made
Home
Work
Sprints

28.
How to act in an OS community
Be helpful
If you have something to complain about, do it
positively
submit issues
provide other options
start a discussion

29.
How to act in an OS community
Remember that many OS maintainers are
working for free
Give credit where credit is due
Pay for Open Source with Kindness
Setting expectations for Open Source
participation:
https://youtu.be/tzFWz5fiVKU?t=49m25s

30.
Demo

31.
Questions?