Create an onboarding process/document

[scott-wilson]

We need to figure out an onboarding process, so that other people interested in participating can join in. There's some parts that we can tackle from a GitHub point of view, or within the project repo (such as a CONTRIBUTING.md file). More research will need to be done to figure out something that'll get developers interested in the project to be able to pick up and go, and for the contribution to be accepted.

Possible Solutions

• GitHub
  • Pull request template: This is still very early. While we want to make sure the contributions are high quality, it is a lot of things to keep track of. Maybe could put the checklist in its own file and refer to it in the PR template.
  • Issue tags: We could tag issues with help wanted and good first issue. Probably worth triaging issues as they come in and tag them.
• Project
  • Add a CONTRIBUTING.md document to describe how to contribute and what to do when.
  • Add some training material on how to get set up and ready to go. For example, we could set up a document for "how to use VSCode's container feature to get started".

URLs

Example contributing files

• https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openexr/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
• https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenColorIO/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
• https://www.opencue.io/contributing/opencue/contributing/
• https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
• https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenShadingLanguage/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Onboarding information

• https://swimm.io/blog/4-ways-to-improve-developer-onboarding-to-your-open-source-project/
• https://mozillascience.github.io/working-open-workshop/contributing/
• https://opensource.com/article/19/12/open-source-contributors