What is the secret for maintainers to sustain newcomers in their communities? Many maintainers know about adding a CONTRIBUTING.md file to their project, but is this enough to effectively support and integrate newcomers into your project? In this session, Elizabeth Barron and Justin W. Flory will provide a baseline for newcomer onboarding in today’s landscape and a close look at the CHAOSS and Fedora projects as real communities of practice. While CONTRIBUTING.md files provide potential contributors with information and support to join the community, they have certain bounds. A poor onboarding experience can actually work against you and turn them away before their first contribution. Building an effective and inclusive onboarding process is crucial to ensuring a healthy open source community. In this talk, you will learn about: - establishing a baseline for what “newcomer onboarding” means in today’s open source landscape - implementing actionable steps to ease onboarding for newcomers and maintainers - two communities and their next steps for improving the contributor onboarding experience. Elizabeth and Justin will represent the CHAOSS Project and the Fedora Project as participants, maintainers, and leaders in the communities and how experiments with newcomer onboarding led to lessons learned and the growth of the contributor ecosystem.
Speakers: Elizabeth Barron Justin W. Flory