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publiclab / SmART-Form

A community science effort to measure formaldehyde in the home environment
https://u.osu.edu/smartform/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Getting familiar with open source communities #11

Closed shapironick closed 6 years ago

shapironick commented 6 years ago

Hi @ShaneYY @kdannemiller @rongjun-qin-321 @DrCastner @gretchengehrke

I'm just creating an issue thread here with some resources for getting acquainted with open source culture and practices.

First time contributors

New to open source/free software? Here are some resources to get you started:

Contributing for non-coders

As many of us are not coders but still play vital roles in advancing the project here are some basics for getting started, for those of us that are not coders.

Coding is not a requisite to being helpful on GitHub, if you don't code you can still help out; in fact, helping to clearly describe and document problems and new feature proposals is at least as important as writing the code itself.

When creating or editing an issue, try to:

  1. Clearly describe the problem, linking to pages where it can be observed, or where a new feature might live. Include screenshots to be very specific!
  2. (for bugs) If you don't know the problem, do what you can to help others narrow it down: provide contextual information like your browser, OS, and what you were doing when it happened. Did it used to work? Does it still, but only sometimes? Help them reproduce it!
  3. Propose a solution. Whether or not you code, describing what should or could happen, or even what you expected to happen is always helpful to someone looking to fix it. This can be as simple as "It should show a notification." or "There should be a way to hide it."

Once an issue is well documented, we can tag it with help-wanted to get the word out that we're looking for someone to try to fix it. If you're not sure if it's ready, ask on the plots-dev list

Finally, if your issue is well documented, try to get involved in some outreach to new contributors to match someone with the project! Tell them what it'll help you achieve and why you'd appreciate help. And coordinate with the plots-dev discussion list to get the word out.

Preparing issues for newcomers

Related to the above, even if you are a coder, we need help "rolling out the red carpet" (as the Hoodie project calls it) for new contribtors, to grow our contributor base. The steps in Contributing for non-coders are a good starting point, but as a coder, you can also deep-link to the relevant lines of code, with Github links and pointers like:

Then the :medium in JavaScript on this line must be changed to :large too: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/blob/master/app/assets/javascripts/dragdrop.js#L64

This is especially great for attracting coders who are not only new to our code, but new to coding in general!

Learn more about how to make a good first-timers-only issue here:

https://publiclab.org/notes/warren/10-31-2016/create-a-welcoming-first-timers-only-issue-to-invite-new-software-contributors

Much of this post was adopted from @jywarren 's contribution to this wiki: https://publiclab.org/wiki/developers#First+time+contributors

I'll add these noted to our contributing guidelines soon. Thanks everyone!

ebarry commented 6 years ago

Hi Nick, could you click edit on this issue and copy the markdown out of here and post in the contributing guidelines? Once it's over there i'll clean it up and then we can close this issue. thanks!

shapironick commented 6 years ago

Thanks, Liz! Its over there now, closed with 203b514, the new guidelines don't address what we already here so please don't delete what is included at the bottom when you tidy :)