Enabling Open Source Contributors
Part 2. How can we get more people involved with our open source game, PowerUp?
I started thinking about this after getting involved with Systers Open Source via Google Summer of Code. I’m working on PowerUp, a text adventure primarily meant to educate young girls.
My original plan was to increase immersion and educational value by first providing the tools for events like automated story sequences and popups, and then help fill out content using those tools. As I worked I began to realize that the evolving state of the game could mean that any content I provided might turn out to be wasted as the text evolved. Also, new scenarios were being added which meant someone else might need to be able to add and update this content in the future. I designed the classes I was creating to be easy for any future developers to use, but, even though the data model was also simple, it was really only something another developer would be able to reasonably contribute.
The problem was that both my contributions and the branching scenario stories were not something a writer or editor could easily work on with us. I don’t even mean a professional writer or editor. I didn’t feel there was any good way to give this to friends and family and ask for their ideas, let alone find a writer to actually write scenes if they weren’t already contributing in other ways.
That’s when I thought we could really use a content management system for our written content. We needed an easier way for everyone, programmers or otherwise, to be able to write and update content than to dig through database tables and static flow charts. So, I proposed to the rest of the team to change my timeline in order to create a tool to accomplish this. I think the investment will be much more impactful than if I created content myself. Not only will this be more convenient editing our evolving content, but it will open the door for other people to contribute. It could also be scaled to become a tool for other projects to use.
So far, I’m focusing the design on a couple different concepts, both of which may seem obvious at first. Open source development is not always confined to a single team, start to finish. Open source contributors may not always be able to familiarize with an entire codebase and documentation. The punch line here is that we shouldn’t expect potential contributors to act like employees if we truly want other people to contribute to our projects.
We’re already designing in this way for our users. Make it simple and accessible. I just think open source projects need another layer of this for contributors. How tall this order is depends on each individual project, but no matter what, I think the open source ecosystem could benefit from this sort of thinking.
Thanks again for listening. Next, I’ll be describing in more detail the tool I’m working on to help with PowerUp. Please do stay tuned.
