Balancing Community Health and Open Source Growth: The Contributor's Role
Session Description
For the last few years, one challenge that has constantly been discussed within the open-source community is how to make open source healthier for everyone.
This isn’t to say that open source is an unhealthy space; rather, it has a much more significant positive impact than most people imagine. However, anytime a project sees a flurry of contributors trying their hands at getting in their contributions and Pull Requests, whether that is a planned occasion like Hacktoberfest, a period of the project going trending on GitHub, or just a random unplanned surge, there happens to be an overwhelming amount of activity for the project maintainers and community leaders to tackle.
The truth is that for most people, contributing to open source is an activity they partake in outside their day-to-day lives, and more often than not, they aren’t equipped to deal with such surges of activity. At such points, contributors sharing the responsibility of supporting and sustaining community health makes for a better, more welcoming community for everyone.
Therefore, in this talk, we will explore what community health means in open-source communities and how contributors can play their role in making it better.
Key Takeaways
Defining the meaning of community health and seeing what a healthy open-source community is
Discovering the challenges that maintainers of growing open-source projects face
Understanding the responsibility of a contributor in sustaining the open-source community
Learning a set of practices that contributors can follow to make their project communities healthier
Session Categories
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Speakers
Aditya Oberai
Reviews
Not detailed enough. I find the community health part of this proposal interesting, but there has been enough discussion around problems in the ecosystem and contributor best practices in forums like IndiaFOSS - which is the route this proposal seems to be taking. On OSS health specifically, this makes more sense coming in from an organisation like CHAOSS that works on this area.
Requesting the proposer to add more details of the talk (solutions in practice etc). Seems very generic at the moment.
The term "Community Health" should be precisely defined in the proposal explicitly. Otherwise it is difficult to make sense of the proposal.