Attracting community contributors by promoting often

This April, AnitaB.org Open Source (where I am an admin for) is running the 2nd edition of Open Source Hack (OSH). This is an opportunity for people to contribute to open source in a safe environment with mentors that commit their volunteer time to review pull requests and create issues specifically for this short-term program.

This time, we selected a few projects that weren’t the most popular from our community so we could shine some light on them. In order for more contributors to get to know it.

One of the admins had sent out an announcement back in March, and this made potential mentors aware of the program, announcing that they could still apply. But participants had to still wait until April, to contribute to OSH.

Today, I crafted a message and sent an announcement in the #announcements channel, tagging everyone (including 3k members of the community), about the program being active at the moment and the projects participating with its issues. In the first 10 min, caught the attention of at least 3 members of the community who were eager to contribute. I assume they probably were not aware that the program was running and just needed a reminder.

I think the idea here is that, in open source, we can’t just assume that people are keeping themselves up to date with a project’s or community’s communication channels on a regular basis. I only assume, our Open Source leaders of the community frequently use our Zulip.

So to get more contributors’ activity, we have to do some advocacy work and ping people from time to time, to remind them of the opportunities we have. We have about 3000 members now on Zulip, but a lot of them might not check our Zulip. Some of them might even have signed up once, and never come back. Just like we might do with some Slack communities. I am in a lot of Slack communities, but I am only active in very few. So if no one tags me, I will check the messages of the slack community at my own time, when it comes to my mind visiting them again.

Oh and this is just 1 little thing I did and feel will work. There is so much more that can help to attract contributors. Here’s a great cheat sheet on what maintainers can do to promote their project. Here the work I do as an admin is targetting a community is to promote multiple opportunities to contribute to multiple projects, but this is still a nice read.