SustainOSS Ways to Encourage Contributors

notes.md

List of Ways to Help Get New Contributors

Ideas

(Sorted by # of people who voted for each one)

• Say "Thank You" / Acknowledgement (8)
• Have website (but website can be a distraction) (8)
• "Setup social spaces" (8)
• Good First Issue (7)
• Status / Recognize status. A way to show/document that someone is a maintainer vs a collaborator (7)
• Have a fast build (6)
• Community Management train people to be good at this! (6)
• Documentation for the architecture (6)
• Contributing.md - all in guide for contributing (5)
• Onboarding (5)
• Have good test coverage (4)
• Rewarding contributions across platforms (StackOverflow, GitHub issues, designs) (4)
• Write down the values of the project (4)
  • so people can decide for themselves if they want to get involved
• Code of Conduct (4)
• Create open office hours (3)
• sending stickers/swag to people. send a postcard (2)
• Issue Template (2)
• Offboarding (Be prepared for losing people) (2)
• PR Template (1)
• plugin called all-contributors which acknowledges every contributor on the README via GitHub avatar (0)

Top ideas, organized by category:

Documentation

• Have website (but website can be a distraction) (8)
• Documentation for the architecture (6)
• Contributing.md - all in guide for contributing (5)
• Write down the values of the project (4)
  • so people can decide for themselves if they want to get involved

Social

• Say "Thank You" / Acknowledgement (8)
• "Setup social spaces" (8)
• Good First Issue (7)
• Status / Recognize status. A way to show/document that someone is a maintainer vs a collaborator (7)
• Community Management—persuade people to do the important but boring work :) (6) - Train people to manage the communities - how to do this though?
• Code of Conduct (4)
• Create open office hours (3)

Technical

• Have a fast build (6)
• Have good test coverage (4)