How to recognize your open source project contributors and grow your community
By: David Herron
Tags: Community, Open Source, Software Development, Github, Tech

There’s a truism — if a community is not growing, it is slowly dying. How is your open source community doing? Is your contributor base stagnant, shrinking or growing? Are you like many open source community leaders with little idea of how to encourage new participation?

There are many opinions out there about growing the activity around an open source project. Successfully building an open source community-driven project is more than just throwing your code on Github and doing development in the open.

Folks must know the project exists, that you’re open to contributions, what the contribution process is, coding practices in the project, and so on.

One very visible tactic is to establish what some call “social proof”. That is, some kind of visual indicator that the project is currently receiving contributions.

What does the word “community” mean in this context?

A “community” is a group of people coming together for a shared purpose or shared goal. The traditional meaning is the folks living in a town, and their shared goal is living peacefully together in that city.

But communities can form for other purposes. For example, a Facebook group about electric motorcycles will host discussions of electric motorcycle brands, where to ride, how to maintain or customize the bikes, and so on. As the members get to know one another through discussing electric motorcycles, they form a community.

Likewise, the folks maintaining an open source software project also form a community whose goal is improving that software. This article is focused on one aspect of growing community participation in an open source project — acknowledging those who contribute to the project.

Many project websites have “widgets” showing data like build status, whether the tests are passing, and so forth. What if another widget showed an indicator of contributors to the project? Namely:

A list of folks making code contributions — demonstrating to the public that this project has contributors

Giving kudos to contributors, so they can have bragging rights, and to feel appreciated

Demonstrate there is communal ownership of the project

Demonstrate who has how much of a stake in the project

Tell the public this project is not the hair-brained idea of one guy/gal who’s coding to suit their whims

The existence of build status widgets and the like demonstrates a place for automatically-updated widgets giving data about open source projects. These widgets are geared for the public, and the purpose is reassuring potential users or contributors the project has an automated build and test system, and whether the current status is green.

But that’s not the only kind of status system a project team may use. For team management purposes, a team might use a private dashboard giving the status of various aspects of their project. Commercial software projects regularly do this. Dashboards are maintained by the product manager to measure progress towards goals. This post is not talking about that kind of status system, but instead, one that is shown to the public.

Isn’t it reassuring to know an open source project is team driven? That there is more than one set of eyeballs looking for bugs? That the direction is not the mad ravings of one person but driven by a collaborative process? If you’re looking to integrate an open source tool into the software driving your business, don’t you need to know the tool has a stable future?

Let’s think first about a status widget that does some of the above. Then look at what some prominent open source projects are doing along these lines. Finally look for any existing tool of this nature.

Brainstorming

Generally speaking, we’re talking about a “status widget” to install on project pages, like the source code repository. The widget must present some data about the contributors to the open source project, and implement as many of the ideas above as possible. Some possible attributes to show are:

Easily installed — insert an HTML widget into websites

Automatically retrieve data from Github/Gitlab/etc commits

Identify the type, size, etc, of code changes in commits

Present contributor data in several forms (customizability)

Present useful information about each contributor

Present useful information about total contributions

Be utterly objective about listing contributors

Actions by some Open Source projects to recognize contributors

Since it’s useful to take a look around and see what others are doing, let’s look at certain high profile open source projects. What are they are doing in terms of recognizing contributors?

Vue.js — This leading UI framework for modern web applications has a “Contributors” widget that links over to a Github page which displays Vue.js code contribution data. The contributor's widget is somehow derived from an OpenCollective widget showing “backers” of the Vue.js project. This shows monetary contributors. The avatars do not necessarily correspond to code contributors on the project.

ReactJS — This leading UI framework for modern web applications has a well-developed Contributors area. But nowhere was there found a listing or recognition of contributors.

Bootstrap — This leading responsive UI framework has a well developed Contributors area. On the main page of the repository are mentioned Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton as the Creators. Under “Copyright” it mentions ownership is split between Twitter and “The Bootstrap Authors”. The latter linking to the Github-generated list of contributors.

Webpack — The project homepage shows several lists of monetary contributors. Each generated by OpenCollective. On the Webpack project repository, it’s clear there is a well-developed Contributors area. It also includes a link to a Medium publication. Here they publish information about how to contribute to the Webpack project. The only folks mentioned here are the Webpack Core Team. Again the lists of monetary contributors generated by OpenCollective.

jQuery — This extremely popular library for DOM manipulation in web browsers has a very well developed contributors guideline. Nothing could be found listing the contributors.

ExpressJS — This popular framework for developing web applications with Node.js. It shows TJ Hollowaychuk as the original author and Douglas Wilson as the current project maintainer. It then links to the contributor list generated by Github. It’s clear from that list those two made the overwhelming majority of code contributions to the project.