How to make your need for external contribution explicit and widely visible?
At Only Dust we believe than in a close future most developers will get paid in crypto to contribute to open source projects, not as employees but as contributors.
To help it happen there is a lot to do: create communities, involve companies, create some kind of on-chain platform for missions to be posted on. That’s a lot to do, too much for one sprint or even one year. So we decided to start small, to find quick wins that can already greatly improve contribution.
A good way to achieve this is to create a standard of labels for contributions on Github. If all repositories that are open to external contribution adopt it, it will be much more easy to identify, regroup and communicate their needs to potential contributors.
So what to put in this standard, from a potential contributor point of view:
- first the obvious, I want to know what type of contribution it is (feature, documentation, refactor, fix, test)
- then I want to be able to filter by the amount of time I’m willing to invest in this contribution (up to one day, one week or multiple weeks)
- also I could use some information about the degree of complexity the contribution require (can anybody do it or do you have to be a PHD in the area to solve the problem, because I don’t have one 😉)
- and last, but not least, I want to know about the amount of context which is required to have before I can start my work (is the contribution an isolated standalone or is it deeply intricated with the rest of the codebase)
And of course we should also have some kind of agreement about the way we talk about the state of a contribution (to do, doing, waiting for review, done).
An adoption of this standard will allow projects to self declare their open contribution and have them handled programmatically by the OnlyDust platform.
We created a first draft of this standard that you can find here: https://github.com/onlydustxyz/github-contribution-labels
And, because a standard only make sense if it is discussed and agreed upon by different groups of people, we highly encourage you to criticize it and make some improvement proposals.
Our discord is here: https://discord.gg/r3Abf2f5
Apes strong together !