  The ability for an Open Source Software (OSS) project to attract, onboard,
and retain any newcomer is vital to its livelihood. Evidence suggests more new
users are joining GitHub, however, the extent to which they contribute to OSS
projects is unknown. In this study, we coin the term newcomer candidate to
describe a novice developer that is a new user to the GitHub platform, with the
intention to later onboard an OSS project. Our objective is to track and
characterize their initial contributions using a mixed-method approach. Our
results show that 68% of newcomer candidates are more likely to practice
non-social coding, 86% tend to work on forward-engineering activities in their
first commits, and 53% show their interest of targeting non-software
repositories. Our quantitative analysis did match only 3% of newcomer
candidates contributions to established OSS repositories, yet 70% of newcomer
candidates claim to already onboard an OSS project. This study opens up new
avenues for future work, especially in terms of targeting potential
contributors to onboard an existing OSS project. More practical applications
would be tool support to (i) recommend practical examples that OSS project
teams can use to lower their barriers for a newcomer candidate to successfully
make a contribution and (ii) recommend suitable repositories for newcomer
candidates based on their preference. Researchers can explore strategies to
sustain newcomer candidate activities until they are ready to onboard an OSS
project.
