Generic and unsolicited emails are not a good way to bring attention to your project

[beshrkayali]

I just received a cold email from one of the owners of this repo asking me to contribute. Reaching out to strangers through unsolicited emails, or "cold emailing", to ask for contributions to an open source project is generally not a good idea. It comes across as impersonal and intrusive, and is unlikely to be well-received by the recipients like me. Open source contributors are often passionate about the projects they work on, and they tend to prefer getting involved organically through their own interests and connections, rather than being solicited. Cold emailing also risks being seen as spam, which can damage the reputation of the project and its maintainers. A better approach is to focus on building an active community around your open source project, engaging with potential contributors through forums, social media, and personal connections. This will help you foster a collaborative and welcoming environment that is more likely to attract meaningful contributions.

[alm0ra]

@beshrkayali Hey thanks for your feedback. I was working on another open source project and i was thinking for a tool for marketing projects on github for how introducing an open source project.

The idea was a scrapper on github for related projects and collecting contributors emails and work on email marketing.

In your idea how it must be ? The problem was the email or email content?

[alm0ra]

@beshrkayali

I apologize if my approach seemed off-putting; that wasn't my intention. I wasn't looking for contributions, but rather testing a method to engage with others.

I'm interested in your suggestions on effective ways to build a community and increase visibility for an open-source project. Additionally, do you think a platform dedicated to introducing open-source projects would be useful? I'd appreciate any insights, aside from the idea of sending cold emails.

[PeterJCLaw]

@alm0ra GitHub isn't a marketing platform and I very much doubt that they or any of its users would appreciate attempts to use it or data gathered from it as one. Doing so is likely against the terms of service. I can appreciate the idea of trying to raise awareness for projects related to each other, however I doubt that cold emailing people is going to be a successful strategy. Asking someone you've cold emailed and who has respectfully complained about that approach for advice about what to do instead doesn't really show that you've understood their concerns.

The idea was a scrapper on github for related projects

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "related projects" here, however if you're intending to look at projects which are committed to by the same contributors, I can see why that would be interesting and might maybe be an interesting way to discover related projects. But it would need to be something driven by the user who wants to go looking for other projects, not something you could achieve by blindly contacting people.

collecting contributors emails and work on email marketing.

Please do not do this. It is likely to get a lot of people very annoyed with you. I believe it may also be against GitHub's terms of service.

As beshrkayali suggests, better approaches will be around engaging positively with users who are already engaging with you/the project somehow. There are various platforms for that already -- GitHub offers Discussions for example. A key thing here is that the people you engage with need to have already shown a desire to interact. (For clarity: I don't know if this was the case, but I'd say that merely using a package somewhere doesn't cross the threshold on this; anyone here to complain about being cold emailed definitely doesn't qualify was wanting to interact).

As a positive example -- your offer for me to get more involved after I'd raised a few PRs was fine though.

[alm0ra]

Hi @PeterJCLaw,

Thanks for your feedback! This was just a small test with a few projects and emails to test the idea and gather feedback. I'll attach the results of the cold email to this issue, and it will remain open for others to provide their feedback on this event.