
Ask HN: How to find contributors for small open-source projects? - anishathalye
Do tiny&#x2F;small open-source projects ever actively look for new contributors?<p>I know that there are programmers looking for stuff to do (a quick Google search for &quot;find open source project to work on&quot; shows lots of results). A lot of responses to questions about this advise people to work on huge projects such as Mozilla Firefox, find projects through sites like OpenHatch, or contribute to projects of which they are already users.<p>Using something like OpenHatch doesn&#x27;t seem to make sense for small projects. Small projects often don&#x27;t have huge user bases to begin with, so there aren&#x27;t a ton of contributors from that set of people.<p>So what about the really small projects that would welcome new contributors? Do they ever actively look for new contributors besides just hoping that users of the project end up deciding to contribute something substantial? What kinds of strategies do people use?<p>Is the Internet even a good place to actively look for contributors? Or does it not make sense for small-scale projects (or in general)? Is it enough just having a good culture surrounding issues&#x2F;pull requests, having a clear contributing guide, and so on?<p>[I&#x27;ve asked a bunch of related questions; feel free to talk about any or all of them.]
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striking
A lot of small open-source projects lack a structure that allows them to be
worked on by more than one person at a time. Without that structure, it is
nearly impossible for external people to contribute to a project.

Categorizing issues by required familiarity with the code ("novice" vs.
"expert" levels) and establishing a good contribution and style guide are just
a few of the very useful things one could apply to his or her smaller open-
source project.

One OS project that I've seen and love is
[https://love2d.org/](https://love2d.org/). Most of the work is done by a few
contributors, but some members of the community give back at times.

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luso_brazilian
Well, concerning to open source and free software (taking advantage of an
expression said by ESR in the Cathedral and the Bazaar [1](: "every good work
of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."

It doesn't matter if it is an alternative to Microsoft Word, a driver for an
obscure wifi card or a fps game, people usually get involved in open source
not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they are passionate by the
end result of their work, software development being only a mean to an end.

So get the word out about the specific problem you are trying to solve with
open source. If there are other people out there with the same problem and the
technical skill to help they most certainly are going to find out about your
effort and try to help.

[1] [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
bazaar/cathedral...](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s02.html)

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brudgers
Contributors are a subset of an open source project community. So the obvious
answer, _get contributors from the community_ , points to the hard general
problem of building an open source community. That's probably more work than
writing code and suggests why programmers may be disinclined to engage in it
when programming is fun.

