Balancing Community Health and Open Source Growth: The Contributor's Role

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.

• 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