Jumping in to help on an existing open source project can be intimidating. I'll outline the steps of how to ease in to the process, which involves ways to help without writing code!

1. Contributing to Open
Source
Chrissy Wainwright

2. About Me
@cdw9
Senior Python
Developer at
Six Feet Up
(I work from home in AR)
Plone Foundation
President

3. What is Open Source?
Product code that is publicly available
Usually has GPL, MIT, BSD Licensing
Repositories in GitHub, Bitbucket, etc
Communities - Python, Django, Plone, etc

4. Why get involved?
Getting to know people
Sense of community
Seeing work you’ve done help others

5. Ways to Contribute
- Difficulty level

6. 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?

7. 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

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

9. 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

10. Ways to Contribute
Monetary Donations

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
Various Teams
• Marketing
• Framework
• User Interface
• Membership
• Security
• Testing & Continuous Integration
• Installers
• Sysadmins
• Board of Directors

17. Ways to Contribute
Open source your own
project!
It’s a great way to help you understand the
process

18. How to Get Involved

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

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

21. Pull Requests
Fix some stuff, commit some code!
Make sure to follow all steps required by the repo.
• Update CHANGES.txt
• Write / update tests, make sure they pass
• Merge in newer changes, fix conflicts
Not all features will be accepted.
How to Get Involved

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

23. How to Get Involved
Finding Projects
• https://www.codetriage.com
• https://github.com/collections/choosing-projects
• https://www.firsttimersonly.com

24. 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

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

26. Questions?