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Recruiting Open Source Contributors: a lesson f...

Recruiting Open Source Contributors: a lesson from Benjamin Franklin

You made a passion project and the seemingly impossible happened: people use it! A lot! And now you’re overwhelmed as the only maintainer. Or maybe you never have a project posted because you're scared of what success means to your mental health.

This talk takes a lesson from OG Thought Leader Benjamin Franklin on how to win others over and get them to help. It highlights some tactical tips for GitHub contributor management, but focuses on the impact of psychology to get people to participate.

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Transcript

  1. Recruiting Open Source Contributors VP Community, Sensu Inc. Matt Broberg

    @mbbroberg Monitorama 2018 a lesson from Benjamin Franklin
  2. @mbbroberg Responsible for the awareness, engagement and health of the

    Sensu Community. Matt Broberg VP Community, Sensu Inc 200+ Plugins On GitHub 10+ Maintainers Volunteering to make monitoring better Open Framework To connect all your monitoring pieces
  3. Asking for Help On GitHub • License • README.md •

    CONTRIBUTING.md • Pull Request Reviews • Issues • Labels • Releases • Milestones • CHANGELOG.md • Templates (.github/) • Permissions (Teams & .owners) • Saved Replies Beyond GitHub • Acronyms (LGTM) • Continuous Integration (Travis) • Chat (Slack/IRC/Gitter) • Recognition (All Contributors) • Social Media (Twitter, etc) • Sharing (Blog, Podcast, Talk) Psychological • Just ask (Ben Franklin Effect) • Make it easy (Sunk cost) • Tell a good story (survivor bias)
  4. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer! License Basics Choose how

    open you are for contribution (and ownership). Permissive MIT Protective Apache 2.0 @mbbroberg
  5. Pull Request Reviews Basics Do you accept PRs? Good default:

    • Be responsive • Have tests @mbbroberg
  6. Psychology How are you helping people help you? Good default:

    • Accept contribution liberally • Encourage repeat contribution @mbbroberg Advanced
  7. Asking for Help On GitHub • License • README.md •

    CONTRIBUTING.md • Pull Request Reviews • Issues • Labels • Releases • Milestones • CHANGELOG.md • Templates (.github/) • Permissions (Teams & .owners) • Saved Replies Beyond GitHub • Acronyms (LGTM) • Continuous Integration (Travis) • Chat (Slack/IRC/Gitter) • Recognition (All Contributors) • Social Media (Twitter, etc) • Sharing (Blog, Podcast, Talk) Psychological • Just ask (Ben Franklin Effect) • Make it easy (Sunk cost) • Tell a good story (survivor bias)
  8. Thanks! VP Community, Sensu Inc. Matt Broberg @mbbroberg Open Source

    101 Maintainer Bits • Learn GitHub (bitly.com/git-it) • Readmes (awesome-readme) • Advice for maintainers (thread) • GitHub Maintainers program • All Contributors project • Sane GitHub Labels project Psychological Bits • Ben Franklin Effect • Buy the cognitive bias codex