Slides and Video week 6

[jurra]

Week 6: Building for open

Your project grows when more and more diverse people jump in and contribute to it. This week you will go through a set of principles, values and concrete tools that will help you lower access barriers for your users and contributors, besides designing strategies for ensuring a welcoming space for everyone.

Goal of the week: Create entry points for contributors and users (Contributor User channels)/ Websites, issues, repositories, labels, code of conduct.

Assignments:

• Create issues for contributors to jump into your project
• Write your contribution guidelines
• Who is participating and who is not in your project? Think of strategies for engaging and including wider audiences, and define your community guidelines (or code of conduct).
• If you have new hypothesis and ideas update your canvas. What would you do to validate these ideas, what experiments would you design?

[jurra]

@vektorious I think there are some things missing:

1. First aspect of building for open is a good documentation of your product release, how it is used how to replicate it etc. (If you dont have a product that people can use, your chances are low ). 👉 Check this one, is very good: - What no body tells you about documentation

2. If you are in a beta phase, with a nice idea you might want to start focused on a project and use different tools that allow people to jump in. This can go from repositories, to google docs, and google drives.

3. Communicating changes in your product, changelogs, and roadmaps.

4. Developing educational resources, guides and how tos.

   Great example and reference that we should site:

   • Precious plastics
   • What no body tells you about documentation

[jurra]

Assignments:

• Create issues for contributors to jump into your project
• Write your contribution guidelines
• Who is participating and who is not in your project? Think of strategies for engaging and including wider audiences, and define your community guidelines (or code of conduct).
• If you have new hypothesis and ideas update your canvas. What would you do to validate these ideas, what experiments would you design?

Remarks

• By this week people have already created issues in their projects. We should remove this assignment.
• The third question is very broad, and if they followed our personas, and pathways they should have thought already about what audience they want to address. Asking them again to think about personas, and making more assumptions about participants its in my opinion out of place. On the other hand this week is where they should implement with rigour their findings of personas, and pathways.
• The last assignment is also a bit redundant we can also remove it.

  The main excercise for this week should be to implement contributor channels. That includes

• Contrib guidelines,
• Templates to open feature requests
• Getting started guides (for users)

  Basic tools:

• Github issues
• Markdown files
• Github wiki for guides

  Advanced tools

• Docs websites with static site generators
• Newsletters and blogs
• Social media adds....

[vektorious]

Hm. I'm not sure if I wrote the Assignments but I thought its more about first timer issues to newbie contributors. (Task 1). Maybe we just have to rephrase it? I agree with everything else!

[jurra]

Agree @vektorious!

Considering this I would reframe the assignments in the following way an order:

• Write your contribution guidelines.
• Share your contribution guidelines draft online (use google docs, hackMD or a markdown file in your repository to get feedback from organizers, mentors and people and participants in the community.
• Create/Reuse markdown templates for contributors to make feature requests, propose ideas, etc. You can look at the example of testCard.md templates
• If it makes sense for your current stage, make a draft of a start guide for the users of your product.
• If there are areas that you need help with outside your core team, open an issue labelled with "help wanted" and specify the issue (for instance, logo design, website design and development, feedback on specific assumptions or hypothesis, proofreading, translations etc.)
• If you want to attract new contributors, consider creating a "first timer only" issue to keep the entry level low.

Alex: edited it a bit.

[jurra]

In coherence with the above ☝️ , for this week's presentation

• We should definetely talk about how to write the contribution guidelines, and use templates to make it easy for contributors.
• We should clearly refer to the Canvas and emphasize that these assignments are focused on implementing and articulating the findings/hypothesis/Assumptions that each project has made about their personas (For contributors and collaborators.)

[vektorious]

I updated your post.

[thessaly]

Hi, I'm not sure where we told people, before now, that they should create issues for contributors.

It's also a bit difficult for me to understand why we change now on things that were agreed, taking into account our heads are on the urgent right now, and we don't have that much time to reflect. I'm ok with changing details, adjusting. But the main exercise of the week?