My 2016 #FOSS Project — Secret Shopper

In the first 6 months of 2016, I have a personal goal of contributing code to 10 Open Source Projects. I’m looking for projects with potential to teach us how to design for the success of contributors, like myself, who bring intermediate to advanced skill-sets and experience.

I’ll be contributing code under another name, ala Secret Shopper, and sharing what I learn in a July post.

I am looking for nominations for Open Source projects that:

• Are available on the web using web technologies.
• Have a released version of their software
• Have an existing community, or set of core contributors.
• Want to improve their contributor design for intermediate and experienced developers.
• Feel they have something they can teach others about community design.
• Invested in increasing diversity of their contributor base.
• Bonus: ‘Open’ Education focus.

What projects will get:

• One or more code contributions from me. I can’t promise they’ll be valuable, but I’ll do my best;)
• Review of the experience (which is the actual contribution)
• Inclusion in a blog post with my findings(in July)

What I hope for myself:

• Emerge with a set of best practices for projects who want to help intermediate and experienced developers successfully join their project as contributors.
• A User story of an experienced developer attempting to join a new community, through a first contribution.
• New and fresh understanding for the experience of stepping into a project as a new code contributor.

If you would like to nominate a project - please do so in comments. Excited to play in FOSS communities this year.

We Can Code It — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Charis Tsevis