Open Stack

Hi folks,

Stefano's post on how to make contributions to OpenStack easier [1]
finally stirred me into writing about something that vkmc and myself
have been doing on the side for a few months to help new contributors
to get involved.

Some of you may be aware of OpenHatch [2], a non-profit dedicated to
helping newcomers get started in open-source. About 6 months ago we
created a project page for Horizon [3], filled in a few high level
details, set ourselves up as mentors. Since then people have been
expressing interest in the project and a number of them got a patch
submitted and approved, a couple are sticking around (often helping out
with bug triaging, as confirming new bugs is one of the few tasks one
can help out with when only having limited time).

I can definitely sympathise with the comment in Stefano's article that
there are not enough easy tasks / simple issues for newcomers. There's
a lot to learn already when you're starting out (git, gerrit, python,
devstack, ...) and simple bugs are so hard to find - something that
will take a few minutes to an existing contributor will take much
longer for someone who's still figuring out where to get the code
from. Unfortunately it's not uncommon for existing contributors to take
on tasks marked as "low-hanging-fruit" because it's only 5 minutes (I
can understand this coming up to an RC but otherwise low-hanging-fruits
are often low priority nits that could wait a little bit longer). In
Horizon the low-hanging-fruits definitely get snatched up quickly and I
try to keep a list of typos or other low impact, trivial bugs that
would make good first tasks for people reaching out via OpenHatch.

OpenHatch doesn't spam, you get one email a week if one or more people
indicated they want to help. The initial effort is not time-consuming,
following OpenHatch's advice [4] you can refine a nice "initial
contact" email that helps you get people started and understand what
they are interested in quickly. I don't find the time commitment to be
too much so far, and it's incredibly gratifying to see someone
submitting their first patch after you answered a couple of questions
or helped resolve a hairy git issue. I'm happy to chat about it more,
if you're curious or have any questions.

In any case if you'd like to attract more contributors to your project,
and/or help newcomers get started in open-source, consider adding your
project to OpenHatch too!

Cheers,

Julie

[1] http://opensource.com/business/14/2/analyzing-contributions-to-openstack
[2] http://openhatch.org/
[3] http://openhatch.org/+projects/OpenStack%20dashboard%20%28Horizon%29
[4] https://openhatch.org/wiki/Contacting_new_contributors