Pains & Gains III Growing a healthy community by dedicating space Gregor Martynus | @gr2m | hood.ie @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

It’s 2016 and thanks to GitHub, collaborating on code is simpler than any of us could have hoped 10 years ago. Code is no longer the challenge in Open Source, people are. And people are intimidated by your Open Source projects today. They enter your place, look around, if they don’t feel welcome, they will turn around and leave. And your project lost a potential contributor and maintainer, forever. You won’t even know that hey have been there! The people who make it trough are sub sub set of your potential contributors. They are confident, maybe over-confident, maybe self-entitled, maybe aggressive ... does that sound familiar? This is HUGE pain and it’s very, very hard to correct once your project is dominated by such kind of personality.. But more importantly, you are missing out as an Open Source project. You miss out on people, perspectives, creating thinking, on a healthy, diverse Open Source community. Open Source is intimidating @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

At Hoodie, we work hard on creating the most diverse and inclusive space possible. And despite being a comparably small, independent projects without any financial backing, we get a lot of recognition for our efforts. Bottom line is, if we can do it, every project can. @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

One of the things we did is creating a dedicated space for new an existing contributors and maintainers. We call it the Hoodie Camp @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

hoodie dot camp is a static website, hosted on GitHub Pages. It does not create additional work to maintain, because it loads all its data directly from the GitHub API, and shout out to GitHub’s API team, it is pretty amazing what we can do with it today, right from the browser. But because we have full control about what we put on it, we can make it all about the people first. For example we show the different teams at Hoodie, and all teams are equally important, instead of just making the differentiation between code & non-code contributions. For each team, we list issues that ready to be worked on. @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

And when you click on one of them, you will be redirected to the GitHub issue that by itself sends a strong message that everyone can claim it without asking for permission. Some of them are reserved for first-time contributors only. @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

We created a milestone app which is backed by milestones and issues in a GitHub repository, that we are currently integrating in hoodie.camp @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

Workflows. Responsibilities Stale issues. Ready PRs Help Pages. Custom tools Open Positions. Shoutouts New & active contributors. Statistics. Mission Statement @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

In code, we carved the way for best practises with the right tooling, and GitHub definitely played a big role for that. If there is one thing I wish us for the next decade is GitHub to lead the way for community tools, too. I’d like to end my short story with two quotes Imagine the tools for our community work would be as good as for coding. @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016

And my favourite quote is by Saron from Code Newbie, and I you are working on an open source project, I always want you to remember it: you don’t build a community, you build a space for a community. And the way you design – and for whom you design it – will determine the community around it, for the life time of the project. Thank you You don't build a community. You build a space — Saron Yitbarek @gr2m | GitHub Universe 2016