As technology advances, many products and services are open-sourced, encouraging collaboration, transparency, and community building. As the owner or maintainer of an open-source project, it can be challenging to attract contributors to your project, especially if they are unfamiliar with the open-source workflow. However, this article provides helpful tips on how you can achieve this.
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Tips for attracting contributors to your open source project
Open source projects thrive on people’s contributions. Therefore, the success of the project depends on attracting contributors. Here are a few tips to help you attract contributors to your project.
Define Your Project Details
- ReadMe file: Your ReadMe file serves as a “how-to” guide for contributors, which should explain how to navigate through your project. The details of your project must be understandable to your contributors.
These details include:
- What your project entails
- The purpose of creating the project
- Its intended users
- Its application areas
- Project’s features
- The technology used
All the details above are required in your ReadMe file.
- Contribution guidelines: Your project should have a contribution guideline that clearly states the ways and processes by which people can contribute to your project. Making this document understandable will save you a lot of time. A well-written
Contributing.mdfile should describe the workflow your project’s maintainers expect from contributors. Try adding links to tutorials or screenshots for newcomers for each process. - Issues: Provide a list of clearly defined problems easily accessible to new contributors. Make it easy for them to start by labelling issues that don’t require extensive knowledge of the project as “good first issues.”
Enhance Your Project’s Visibility
- Add topics to your repository: Topics related to your project’s intended purpose, subject area, or other important features should be included to make it easier for people to discover and engage with your project. Your project is more likely to appear in GitHub topics when people search for projects through them. Topics appear on the right side of the GitHub repository. You can add topics to your project by clicking the settings icon and editing the repository details.
- Label issues appropriately: Labeling issues makes it easier to find issues that can serve as a starting point for contributing. Label your issues with more specific terms, such as ” good first issue,” “beginner friendly,” “easy,” “help wanted,” etc., to highlight that the issue is easy enough for an initial contribution.
Make Your Project Public
Another way to get people involved in your project is to tell them about it. Talk about your project on social media, at conferences, on community channels, in blog posts, in open-source hackathons, etc.
- Conferences: During these conferences or speaking events, explain what you are building, why you are building it, how you tackled issues through the project, what you learned from the project, and how it can help others.
- Blog: Use platforms like Hashnode, Medium, dev.to, or your blog to share facts about your project.
- Social Media (Twitter Spaces/ Tweets/ Podcasts/ Community Channels): Tweet about your project. Request to speak on Twitter spaces or podcasts. When you get the chance, modestly share information about your project.
- Open Source Hackathons and Programs: There are several open source hackathons and programs that you can participate in as a maintainer, like Open Jam, Hacktoberfest, Contributhon, etc. For example, Hacktoberfest, a month-long event, usually in October, encourages the use of the “hacktoberfest” tag and label, which can boost the visibility of your project and inspire people to contribute.
Make Your Project Scalable
Scalability in this context means that your project should easily adapt to many users or contributors.
As soon as you get contributors, keeping up with every pull request or issue may become difficult. Automating the tedious tasks to save time, like using GitHub Actions to handle the release process, enabling self-assigning issues, style checking, etc., will help your project improve its scalability.
Make Communication Accessible
The open-source community relies heavily on communication, and these channels ensure that contributors can ask questions and be heard. Your communication channels must be easily accessible and flexible. Be considerate of contributors from different time zones by not limiting yourself to one form of communication.
Present Quality Code and Documentation
The quality of the code and documentation is often one of the determining factors for participation in a project, as are the contributors’ interests. Contributors tend to overlook a poorly presented project, even if it piques their interest. To avoid this, maintain high-quality documentation and well-written and structured code.
Recognize and encourage Participation
Encouraging participation must be frequent and done with enthusiasm. Recognizing and rewarding good contributions is a good way to raise spirits among contributors. If someone makes a contribution you don’t like, respond with kindness and teach them what they did wrong. A negative response would make people not want to contribute to your project.
Once you gain contributors, show them gratitude through recognition or rewards. A good place to start is to create a list of contributors on your project website and in the project archive. You can reward contributors with swags, stickers, or mentions in a blog post or on social media. This shows them that their contributions are valued and encourages them to contribute more.
Always Keep Your Project Active
Keep your project active, even if no one contributes. Contributions are usually made to projects that have a recent pull request.
Conclusion
You will need patience and persistence to find contributors to your open-source project, so do not give up. In the meantime, promote your project through blog posts, tweets, organizing Twitter spaces, etc. Finally, when you have contributors to your project and can not think of any new features, set up ways to make it easier to manage and scale your project.
