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\[35:48\] It's sad, but you still to some extent have to know people... And I don't necessarily mean famous people, because I have no time for tech celebrities, and the concept of such, even though I know that I may be considered some form of name in the open source community -- well, I mean, I've been invited on this ... |
If you start with a good readme, maybe you have a couple of beginner issues that you can... Or even you just ask people to kind of collaborate with you and have a nice attitude, I think that can go a long way. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that the readme thing is so important. This is probably one of the biggest and positive shifts from GitHub - how important and upfront GitHub made the readmes. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yes! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It really does set all of the expectations for your project, good and bad. I have some projects where the readme literally says, "Don't use this. Don't try to contribute to it. This is not in a state where you should mess with it yet." and then a lot of other readmes that say the exact opposite. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** It's about intention, and if you can make your intention immediately clear, you can either save someone a lot of time, so they know not to hack on Mikeal.js, because it's not ready for human consumption. Or you outline a few things you're looking to ship. Intention is key, and I can probably do a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think about documenting everything also. Not just documenting how your products works, but it's also documenting processes, documenting the time that you do or don't have available... All that stuff. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, which is a lot of what we do in the Hoodie editorial team. It's like, "How do I do this thing? Why are we doing this thing? What is our goal and how are we gonna get there?" |
**Nadia Eghbal:** For projects that have beginner-friendly issues, how do they decide what counts as a first-timers only type issue? Because that seems like an imbalance that you even felt from your first PR where people tagged things as "first timers only" and they're very clearly not. But it's hard to remember someti... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** It's super difficult, and I think that there's issues for a beginner to a project that assumes that you have some form of experience, and then there are the issues where anybody who's never used, or potentially hasn't even programmed before, could do it. In a lot of the "first-timers only" issues... |
It's a sliding scale, and I don't think anybody who says... I don't know if there is a true beginner issue, but as long as people are around to help the people who might get stuck on the beginner issue, then it's okay. But there's not such thing as easy, and this is something that I say a lot as well. Easy is never eas... |
With Hoodie, we always have someone around that will be able to guide someone if they're not doing so well on an issue. So even if it's a hard beginner issue, we'll help you get there in the end. And if you can't get there in the end that's okay, but you made it some of the way. As long as you learn something, then we'... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It sounds like the most important thing is to build the support system, and then the support system can improve on itself by improving the criteria for first-timer issues and stuff like that. But as long as you have that support system there, you're gonna be able to help people out anyway, right? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah, I mean building a support system is extremely difficult. I'm an admin for a relatively new JavaScript Slack called WeAllJS.org, which was started by Kat Marchán, and I can tell you that 50% of the conversation and the messages sent in that Slack group is the admins in the private channel go... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think it's a good time to take a break. When we come back, we'll talk about how to get new contributors coming back. |
**Break:** \[41:46\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** In the beginning of this podcast we were talking a little bit about the need to keep first-time contributors going in some way, and figure out how to give them medium-level opportunities to continue being involved. Can we come back to that a little bit and talk about how to retain first-time contribut... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Well, the first thought that came into my head was actually transparency. If you let people know what's happening in the project, then they're more likely to be able to keep up with you, and they'll also have an idea of where they can kind of contribute. A lot of programming languages and framewo... |
\[44:08\] I didn't know what was happening half of the time. Someone would be, "Oh yeah, we've talked about that the other day", and I was like, "Well, you know, I wasn't there for that conversation and you didn't document it anywhere, so how am I supposed to know where to go next?" So a little bit of transparency, rel... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** When I first thought about it, I was thinking "what are the next issues you can throw at a contributor to keep them going?", but what you were talking about is more about getting someone involved in the community and making it fun, and having them feel an emotional connection to the project, right? |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. Seeing everybody as equals, rather than maintainers and contributors is a big thing. If you can keep people involved in the conversations... This is something that I believe just in the general day-to-day. I feel like having a junior in your team is extremely valuable because they question ... |
If I said to them, "Okay, we're gonna rebuild everything in React", which obviously would never happen, because Hoodie is a framework, but for example... "We're gonna build everything in React", so maybe for the next couple of weeks your contributions could be learning React and being able to help us build these certai... |
Having mid-level GitHub issues is a great thing; it's something that we at Hoodie aren't necessarily doing a good job of at the moment, but I do know that we keep potential contributors and users informed of what we do on a day-to-day. I think that's very valuable. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think there's this interesting contradiction that you eventually get into at scale between transparency and communication. Transparency is like table stakes, right? People can't get involved if they can't see it happening, so it has to be transparent. But eventually so many things are happening tha... |
We're continuing to just try to figure out ways that we can inform people. We actually have Jenn Turner who does the Hoodie newsletter... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Oh, I love Jenn. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** She's working on the newsletter for Node.js now, so that we can try to keep people more up to date... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** That's awesome. Jenn does great work when it comes to communicating, stuff like that. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, she's fantastic. Really fantastic. And I think also we've even had some contributors show up that are saying, "You know what? You all documented these policies a while back, but actually when I watch you operating, you're operating a little bit differently. We need to get the policy updated." W... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** \[47:48\] I actually have contributed something to Node such that my name pops up every so often when you do a new release, and I updated your code of conduct, because I knew where to go and I knew that that's how the community worked. But yeah, I think about Node.js largely when it comes to kind... |
So it's good for me to look at maybe how things don't necessarily go the way that you planned, and for me to go "Okay, well how can I learn from that, do it better and then feed it back, so that they can do it better as well?" Because for a short time I was on the Node.js Inclusivity Working Group for example, and it's... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, yes, that's definitely true. For us, in a year and a half we went from 70 to now over 90 committers. It also happened really quickly, and while that was really scary to go through, it also had this kind of side benefit of us not really being able to cargo cult any process. The process had to cha... |
Looking at the Hoodie project and Your First PR, I think it's all coming from the same culture of openness and inclusion, and the kind of open open source liberal contribution agreements where you're getting people to commit rightfully quickly, and stuff like that. |
With the Node project, we've just been constantly iterating on all of the processes. The processes are not set in stone. The processes are immutable, they need to change all of the time, and everybody needs to get comfortable with changing them. That then allows us to change and scale as we go forward. |
I think that one of the worst things that I've seen projects do, especially huge projects, is that they find a process that works at the scale that they're at, and then when they double in size, it doesn't work anymore and they don't feel enabled to change it. They feel like, you know, this is the only process that ena... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yeah. One of the first things I say when I give my Open Open Source talk is "Although the word is in the name, open source is actually incredibly closed", because there definitely is that cargo culting. I'm subject to that as well, because once I'm comfortable with something, I don't like things ... |
Be open to change, that's literally what open source is about, right? It's open, and if we cannot be open, then we really do need to change that name. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Exactly. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Like "door slightly open between the hours of five to ten PM" source, you know? \[laughter\] Working title. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I like these jokes. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** I'm hilarious, right? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** You are hilarious. \[laughter\] |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Yay! Validated! |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Shifting gears a little bit, something else you had mentioned in the beginning of this podcast was Hacktoberfest, which is happening this month. For people who don't know what it is, it's an online event to get new contributors to projects, and if you make four pull requests on a project, then you get... |
\[52:00\] So for events that are focused on getting new contributors to projects, I think there's a lot of good will among events and initiatives that want to increase contributions, but then having to balance on the other side, of not upsetting maintainers who might not be expecting a barrage of PRs, who might not act... |
**Charlotte Spencer:** Probably not, but I'll give it a go. Which part do we wanna talk about first - how to do an event, or how to try to ensure those kind of low quality, spammy type PRs that I've seen happen recently, like how to stop those? Because my first thing is if you wanna do an initiative, then particularly ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's not, apparently. |
**Charlotte Spencer:** It's open source, but people don't like talking to other people. This is the most I've spoken to anybody in like a week. Communication is really difficult, but if I walk up and say "Hey, I'm gonna do an event for Hoodie (imagine that I'm not a Hoodie contributor at this point) and I'm gonna get a... |
That initial communication of like "Hey, I'd really like to do this thing. Do you have the capacity to deal with me doing this thing?" Because at the end of the day y'all are doing the contributions, but I'm the one at the end of the day who's sitting there and ticking all the boxes off and merging those PRs or not mer... |
If the answers are yes, then I guess we get started with our first event, which is awesome. Before I was a developer I was an events organizer for the tech community, and it's an extremely hard job, but I don't think... For these kinds of things you need to be super professional, you need a comfy chair, some water, som... |
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