Recruiting Playbook

Recruiting Contributors

Status: Draft; Missing Components

Summary

Recruiting and retention go hand in hand. If you are thinking “how can we add more amazing contributors?” and “where do we find them?” the projects leadership needs to think about how you keep folks around, too. Once you open the gates to more contributors of any type, balancing maintainers time becomes the next challenge. This is why it’s important to think of recruiting and retention initiatives together rather than separate.

For the purpose of this document, we will dig into the How and Where to do outreach. This exercise depends on your audience, how they consume information, and their motivations to help an open source project.

Where

Always be recruiting. Think of ways to always promote your needs and areas of growth for the project anytime you have a chance. Be as specific as you can when you are communicating though. The more ambiguous it sounds, the less likely someone is to check it out or take interest. Talk about roles (example: reviewers in a certain area/subject, community managers, project managers, go developers) and provide any kind of guides, role descriptions, contributor ladder as you have. The more of these documents that you have available in your project repository the easier it will be for you in explaining how your project works to potential new contributors.

General areas with specifics below:

• your repo via labels, issues calling out help wanted areas, project boards, and other organization
• a contributor site/area of the project site for contributors
• mailing list adverts and promotions (weekly help wanted?)
• in-person or virtual talks and workshops about the project
• section during community meeting
• project twitter announcements

Specific Projects & Programs

Your README and project website

What: Adding the links to how to contribute and what you are contributing to on your main README is the most effective way Links to good examples: TODO include containerd ’now recruiting'

Contributor Documentation

Contributor Guide (for all contributors)
[TODO include recommendations and links]
Developer Guide (deep dive for developers)
[TODO include recommendations and links]

Issue and PR Triage strategy

This is the first thing new contributors will see after some kind of interest in your project.
Good first issues
Help Wanted
Be kind.
In triage and anywhere in your community. if folks are coming around to file
issues and submit one-off PRs, being kind can help them want to do it again the next time they think about it. Saying please, thank you, and welcome never hurts.

New Contributor Workshops

[TODO add summary] New Contributor Workshops are a live version of your contributing guide with the intent of getting a contributor up and running with their first PR, environment set up, or some other end goal that leads them to the path quickly. The project can explain the norms, address culture and values with a discussion, and make relationships that wouldn’t usually happen that fast (or at all). Recording the content is a best practice; it can be shared, distributed, and linked at any time. This can allievate burden from maintainers on training new contributors.

At targeted events

Benefit: form relationships with people in person to create lasting efforts; add more TODO
Where: KubeCon, Kubernetes Community Days, Cloud Native Events, Project-named events like Contributor Summits
Best Practices and past examples: TODO Links

Online

[TODO - expand] Benefit: reach a wider, global audience; add more TODO Activites:

• Governance overview
• Live PR walk through end to end
• Code walk through videos
• Links to talks in conferences
• Links to presentations/meetups Best Practices and past examples: TODO links

Contributor Playground

A contributor playground is a non-production repository where contributors can practice submitting pull requests, interacting with any project bots, and safely test out how to participate. This can be paired with a workshop or on its own for people to try. This gives new contributors the opportunity to get used to the CI and build systems and the ownership/governance model. This can reduce the frustration that contributors have contributing to a new project as well as reduce the common questions about these areas to maintainers.

[TODO add examples]

AMAs / Office Hours / Meet the Maintainers

Different topics of live questions can help grow your community, mentor at scale, and provide technical assistance when people really want to talk to a human. No matter the topic, this can help recruit contributors, too, depending on how you position it. Example: technical office hours can bring new use cases and validating current ones - you can ask people to file issues, PRs, or come to additional meetings to help out. Meet the maintainers [TODO - add example links to documentation and sites, etc.]

Build a community, outreach, contributor, or related team or hire a community manager

Create the intentional space for this work to always be occurring if your project has goals of becoming a contributor community (have many contributors). [TODO paris is working on this in a separate thread]

Internships

Google Summer of Code
Google Summer of Docs
LFX Mentoring
Outreachy
CommunityBridge

Open Source Hackathons

Hacktoberfest
100 Days of Code

[What else? PR yours in here]