Ongoing activities for this program are the subtasks of this task
Onboarding new developers program
It is a FY 2017-18 annual program and will be coordinated by the Technical Collaboration (mainly the Developer Relations subteam). This task will keep track of the our work & activities conducted related to this program. The overall goal here is to achieve a sustained increase of new developers contributing to Wikimedia projects, clearly departing from the current stagnant trend.
More information on meta: link1, link2
To meet some of the goals associated with the program, we’ve agreed on conducting the following activities:
- Research new groups & programs
- Developer outreach programs
- External developer events
- Wikimedia events
- Multilingual newcomer docs
- Support channels
- Metrics analysis
- Featured projects and tasks
We’ll use the following logic model to evaluate our activities:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logic_model_for_onboarding_new_developers_annual_program.svg
Discussion on potential initiatives
- A research study through feedback survey & 1:1 interviews with participants of the current round of GSOC and Outreachy geared at understanding why new developers get attracted towards contributing to our software projects, what challenges they face in this process, and why they plan to stick or leave our community.
- Revise outreach program docs
- Design & develop a newcomer portal taking inspiration from other projects.
- Examples
- List of featured projects recommended for new developers
- Introduce a new tag for newcomers e.g. #newcomer-friendly. Coordinate with teams on making a variety of such projects discoverable for newbies on a regular basis.
- Partner with local groups such as Women Who Code, Black Girls Code, R-Ladies and outreach programs for underrepresented & minorities.
- Consolidate results from group chat mentoring project, and decide on next steps.
Too ambitious?
- Explore modern alternatives of Wikimedia planet, and where else to celebrate newcomer contributions
- Explore discourse as a Q&A option for mailing lists
Resources
- How to encourage new contributors? https://opensource.com/article/17/4/encourage-new-contributors
- Making your open source project newcomer friendly http://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/01/03/making-your-open-source-project-newcomer-friendly/
- Attracting, onboarding and retaining developers http://www.igor.pro.br/publica/papers/GSD_CSCW2014.pdf