Become an OpenHatch
Affiliated Project.
Make your project more accessible to newcomers by following the steps outlined below. We'll help you get your project ready, then feature it on our website and at Open Source Comes to Campus events.
The three-step process
The steps below are adapted from our In Person Event Handbook. They're aimed at projects who don't yet have a system for welcoming newcomers. If your project already has an established onboarding process, contact us and we can figure out how to collaborate without making you do extra work.
Step 1: Writing a Guide
Over time, we've learned that the best projects to recommend to newcomers are those that have clear, thorough guides for newcomers. We ask for:
- Contact information for the project as a whole, as well as one or more maintainers to be our point-people.
- A project overview explaining the purpose of the project, as well as its basic structure, tools and technologies.
- A step-by-step installation guide to help people set up the development environment.
- A step-by-step contribution guide to help people make changes and contribute them back to the project.
Of these, creating the installation guide seems to take the most time. We're happy to arrange a set-up sprint for your project. A set-up sprint is an IRC meeting where OpenHatch volunteers attempt to install your project. A sprint will help you quickly find and fix problems with dependencies, documentation, and more.
Step 2: Identifying Tasks
Once your guides are written, we'll ask you to identify bite-sized tasks that new contributors can tackle. A good first task should not require extensive knowledge of the code base to fix, and should be doable relatively quickly. They can be code-based, but don't need to be. Documentation, bug verification, testing, design, translation, and other types of tasks are all very welcome. You can find further explanation, including examples, here.
Step 3: Helping Remotely
If you're available and interested in helping at a particular event, we'd love to have you join the event remotely, via IRC. "Projects Time" spans about 2-3 hours, usually on a weekend afternoon.
We want everything to be as fun and productive as possible for you and our attendees. To do that, we'll ask you for the following:
- Before the event, we'll put you in touch with a local volunteer who will be leading the small group working on your project. Before the event, they'll go over your guides and tasks with you, to make sure they're familiar with the project.
- During the event, you should be available on IRC to answer questions, troubleshoot problems, and respond to pull requests and other changes.
- After the event, we'll ask that you respond quickly to submitted changes, either by merging them or advising attendees on how they can be improved. We'll work with you to help you follow up with attendees and welcome them into your project community.
Of course, if you're local to one of our events, you're welcome to attend and lead in person!
The result? Happy students making real contributions.
Get started
Copy and paste the text to the right into your email program and send it to hello@openhatch.org. Be sure to replace the ALL_CAPS_WORDS with your information! Alternatively, you can find us in the OpenHatch IRC channel.
To: hello@openhatch.org Subject: becoming an OpenHatch Affiliated Project Hi there! I'm a maintainer of PROJECT_NAME and I'd like to have my project at your events! You can find the project at PROJECT_URL. Sincerely, MY_NAME
