Give and get in the wonderful world of contribution: Planet 4 at the AnitaB.org’s Open Source Day
Contributing to projects designed to solve real world problems. All together. All in one day.
*This post has been written in collaboration with Dan Tovbein
No Greenpeace Organisation accepts money from governments, corporations or political parties, which means it’s only by contributions from individuals that we sustain our work. This is also the case for Planet 4.
With the credo that P4 is and always will be a fully open source project, the intention to give something back to the community (our expertise, code and enthusiasm) and the need for help to develop this technology, the team decided to join the Open Source Day (OSD), on October 1st.
Open Source is good for everyone, at all levels
Starting a career is not easy, especially in the Tech world. Young professionals usually possess a lot of enthusiasm and skills, but lack experience, and this can be so frustrating! Those young minds may think “Why would someone want my code, if I don’t have any previous experience?”.
Well, the answer is “because open source projects exist“! Anyone can collaborate with a minimal piece of code and at the same time make connections with tech-minded folks from all over the world or with organizations in need of help.
Plus, open source events and projects are free of charge, which for students’ and young professionals’ pockets is always a good thing..
Besides being of great value for beginners, open source events are also a great chance for participants of all skill levels to learn about FOSS while contributing to projects designed to solve real world problems. Can you think of any faster or easier way to get a glance on how Organisations manage those kinds of projects? People can see tickets, pull requests, merges and deployments created to improve a live software and work on them, creating real change just as the staffed development team!
The P4 team’s preparation and efforts during the Open Source Day
With the event approaching, the Planet 4 team had to prepare all useful information for contributors to get quickly up to speed, for example by creating tickets, refining Github issues and updating the installation document.
At the very beginning of the event we had a meeting with some Open Source Day’s mentors and collaborators who decided to work on Planet 4 (among the other super interesting projects). This was a quick introduction call to present the team, our work and the tickets of the P4 github repository.
While the event was taking place, we spent most of our time in providing support to anyone interested in helping out, troubleshooting local installations, making new connections and capturing issues and opportunities for improvement.
To ensure that nothing got lost during the event, we had a special note board on github to capture the issues which were picked up, the ones who have potential for future collaborations and the ones which really didn’t spark much enthusiasm.
Personal reflections and post-event stuff!
Dan Tovbein: This was my first time attending the OSD as a representative, and it was a really good challenge because you have to deal with a lot of different requests by collaborators, messages and meetings, and having to support every problem they had during the whole day. Is that easy? No, definitely not.
Pieter: It was my second time attending OSD as a representative, and it’s nice to see the progress we made to our local development setup and documentation compared to last year. For most participants it was just plug-and-play (well, “make dev” and play :). The setup issues some had were easier to address, and in many cases we even found participants had already helped each other out while we were still responding! Much credit goes to Flo's relentless efforts over the past year to make the local development experience easier to understand and work with. That in turn was also motivated by feedback from last year’s OSD. Curious to see what comes out of this one!
Suzi Grishpul: We learned a lot from participating in last year’s OSD — namely that we needed to prioritise making the process of setting up a development environment smoother, in order to lower the barriers to contribution. We made some great improvements on this front and saw a lot more activity as a result! Participating in a virtual hackathon isn’t easy, it’s hard to capture the energy and excitement of being in a room together. But seeing the conversations coming through on slack, Zoom, and in our GitHub repo definitely made me feel connected to our volunteers, and I hope it did the same for them!
Andrada Radu: I learned that it is essential to make sure the tickets are clear for people who were not involved with the project beforehand. In that regard, it might be useful to ask someone who is not part of the team and not aware of the project to read the tickets and make sure they do make sense for a professional who did not have any contact before. This also helps save time and the energy of the team’s representatives during the day.
Lastly, joining Planet 4 is not bound to a specific event! The P4 github repository or a message to the Planet 4 team can enable contributions to anyone, at any time, from anywhere.
If by collaborating with Greenpeace you can save the world, by collaborating with Planet 4 you can save the code!
