Finding your tribe

Choosing open source communities

Cintia Del Rio

https://slides.com/cintiadelrio/oss-communities/

Cintia Del Rio

• Sydney

• DevOps (6+ years), Java dev (?)

• OpenMRS infrastructure and Release Automation (4+ years)

Why I'm talking about this?

• Product or library (licensed)

• Development Process

• Community

Open Source

Why?

• Learn skills
• Peer recognition
• Sense of ownership
• Sense of belonging
• Altruism

https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2001/0981/07/09817014.pdf

https://dri.es/scaling-open-source-communities

Scuba Github diving

Source available

• Backed by companies
• Core maintainer and roadmap controlled by them

Source available

• Very limited external influence
• Most communication doesn't happen in public channels

One man person band

• Single (or very few) core maintainers

• Common for dev tools and libraries

https://github.com/fre5h/DoctrineEnumBundle/pull/12

One man person band

• Very few resources
• Conflicts might not be handled so well

Communities

• Communication channels
  • Forums, mailing list, chat
• Multiple core developers
• Github organisation
• Code of conduct

Is it dead yet?

• Commits
• Issues
• Pull requests
• Communication channels

Aggressive, me?

• Commits
• Issues
• Pull request
• Communication channels

• "Bad" issues
• Declined pull requests

• "If there is a mailing list/irc/slack, is it a trash fire?"

Aggressive, me?

Code of Conduct

Non-coding work

Translations

(for products)

Diverse group

Grammar mistakes and Typos

Newbies tags & Getting started docs

Cool languages

Jerks in leadership

"I usually end up working on things

because I need them rather than choosing specific communities,

though I have left some"