Ask HN: How do you invite contributors to contribute on your project? - wasi0013
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kbr
I usually don't invite contributors to my own project. Instead, people who are
interested will naturally begin to make more and more issues and pull requests
as they get more into your project.

If you get a project out there, people interested in it will start to help
out. Gradually, this turns into that person becoming a contributor to a
project.

~~~
mobitar
I second this. I've noticed that when you solicit contributions, they never
come. They need to come of their own accord. I created a "contribute" repo [1]
for Standard Notes because a lot of people were asking "how can I contribute?"
But it's been collecting dust. Instead, people contribute when they want to,
from different sources.

[1]
[https://github.com/standardnotes/contribute](https://github.com/standardnotes/contribute)

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wmichelin
There's a famous Chris Rock quote about him being broken down on the side of
the road. When he was standing there waiting for help, nobody wanted to help.
When he started pushing the car himself, people would always get out and help
him. People love to see you helping yourself, and will naturally come help you
if you are visible enough.

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zython
Before everyone starts posting her/his own projects in this thread I'd like to
pitch my idea to what I personally am looking in this situation: a board
similar to [https://starters.servo.org/](https://starters.servo.org/) for open
source project where I can learn a new language by fixing bugs/resolving
issues that can be ranked from beginner to expert, so you can find interesting
projects fix bugs and learn new languages at once.

The link I have posted only covers the mozilla servo project and I can see
this concept working with multiple projects/languages/etc.

Of course one would need to heavily moderate the submissions but I think this
idea is great. Anyone know if something like this exists ?

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xz0r
One good example that I can point out is Homebrew's github repository[1]

The README is so clear and welcoming new contributors, by telling how exactly
they can start contributing. In fact that encouraged me to start contributing
to opensource. Now I'm doing Google Summer of Code under the same
organization.

[1] [https://github.com/homebrew/brew](https://github.com/homebrew/brew)

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agibsonccc
People tend to have different incentives for contributing. A ton of it is
people scratching their own itch.

You still need a core team to drive a project. If you want contributors you'll
need users.

People have a finite amount of time in a given day. They aren't going to
contribute because you want them to. They want to get something out of it. It
could be learning something, fixing a bug that affects their day job, an
interesting side project for a weekend (some folks pick random projects to
contribute to)

Open sourcing something also has different incentives. Many successful
projects are either run by foundations or companies with the hopes of
attracting talent.

Try to understand what the incentive structure is for people and contributors
follow from that.

You still need to do project promotion as well. That's a whole separate topic
though.

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Mz
I think this is a hard problem to solve because actual invitations seem to not
work well. In other words, writing to someone and asking them in specific
seems to not go good places.

I think it works better to focus on a) making sure to create a welcoming or
inviting atmosphere and b) leaving the door open logistically.

It needs to be apparent to other people that new contributors are welcome and
it also needs to be apparent to other people where and how they can go ahead
and step up to bat. These can be tricky things to pull off. It is much, much
easier conceptually to just think "I know! I will actually literally invite
people!" (aka ask them to contribute) and this means you may be asking people
who have no interest in the project or not ability to effectively contribute
or both.

I am still working on solving this piece for my own projects. Trying to be
inviting without literally sending out invitations is tricky. But I think that
is what works best to make it possible for those who have both interest and
ability to get involved on terms that work for them.

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type0
Good documentation as well as write about what can be improved and that you're
open to new ideas and contributors.

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cdubzzz
"Up For Grabs"[0] was posted on HN a while and it seems like a cool idea, but
doesn't seem to have a ton of traction.

[0] [http://up-for-grabs.net/](http://up-for-grabs.net/)

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afarrell
One thing to include: an explanation of how much background someone should
have before contributing. You might think this is intimidating, but it is
really helpful because it lets a potential contributor disambiguate whether
they should

A) Just start contributing, sure in the knowledge that they aren't missing
some piece of background that others would consider obvious.

B) Go off and search for a good book/course to learn about X, where X is a
googlable phrase that your contributing.md just told them.

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nikivi
We actually wrote a blog post that we link to anyone wanting to contribute to
our project and we simply link that if anyone shows any interest.

Here is the project : [https://learn-anything.xyz/](https://learn-
anything.xyz/)

And here is the article we link to : [https://learn-
anything.github.io/2017/06/15/contributing.htm...](https://learn-
anything.github.io/2017/06/15/contributing.html)

It saves quite a lot of time as we try to cover all the ways in which one can
help with the project there.

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napsterbr
I've created [https://letsbuildagame.org](https://letsbuildagame.org).

Too bad I don't have the time to maintain or update such website, nor to
actually keep reasonable docs at the pace things are changing.

I had the aspiration to create a truly contributor friendly project. It turned
out to be way harder than I expected, at least for a small team like ours.

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nithinm
im the author of pygsheets (a library for acessing google sheets from python)
[https://github.com/nithinmurali/pygsheets](https://github.com/nithinmurali/pygsheets).
As mentioned in other comments i think you will only get contributions if your
project is useful. the project will only grow if it has some users. once you
have some users you will start getting issues created. you would have to fix
some issues at first. Now if your project has a good enough documentation. you
will start getting some pull requests. it will go uphill from there.

------
FLGMwt
If you have a project looking for contributors, this question might be a good
place :)

~~~
wasi0013
Thanks for the suggestion! Let me introduce LABvantage - A Laboratory
Information Management System developed using Django, Python 3, Celery,
PostgreSQL targeting primarily oil labs. Its still in the early development
phase. As, we progress we are aiming to improve and, also extend LABvantage to
support various lab domains as well.

Source:
[https://github.com/dreamcatcherit/labvantage/](https://github.com/dreamcatcherit/labvantage/)
:)

