On Being an Open Source Contributor  ## Metadata - Author: [[Aurooba]] - Full Title: On Being an Open Source Contributor - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #WordPress - #OpenSource - #CommunityInclusivity - #NonCodeContributions - #ContributorExperience Author: Aurooba Source: Article Reference: https://aurooba.com/on-being-an-open-source-contributor/ date created: 2025-08-22 00:00 --- # Title: On being an open source contributor ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: - Aurooba. “On being an open source contributor.” 2023-05-31. https://aurooba.com/on-being-an-open-source-contributor/ - Tuesday Letters (author’s newsletter) mention within the article. ## 📝 Summary: The article argues that open-source contribution—especially in WordPress—has been increasingly conflated with direct, official contributions to the core project (commits, badges, props). The author challenges this narrowing of value, emphasizing the broader ecosystem of contributions (tutorials, thought pieces, community conversations) that meaningfully grow and sustain WordPress. Drawing from personal experience earning a “Core Contributor” badge via a marketing/documentation task before later contributing code, the author highlights how badges don’t capture current involvement or overall impact. The piece calls for reexamining biases about who counts as a contributor and whose opinions deserve weight. ## 📖 Main Content: The author observes a trend: opinions from those without core commits or badges are dismissed. While triage mechanisms are necessary in large communities, over-reliance on “official” signals narrows whose perspectives are valued. The strength of open source lies in the surrounding community labor—education, content creation, social conversations, and informal networks—that lowers barriers to entry and amplifies adoption. The author’s personal story underscores how contribution is multidimensional: a marketing/documentation task led to a Core badge, yet social perception equated that badge with code-only legitimacy, fueling imposter syndrome until later code contributions. Ultimately, badges are fun but insufficient indicators of current contribution or influence; community health requires broader recognition and inclusivity. Personal insight: - Valuing only code flattens a socio-technical ecosystem into a repo-centric view. Adoption, documentation, and pedagogy are multiplicative forces. - Healthy contributor pipelines rely on recognition loops—honoring non-code work invites more diverse participation and long-term sustainability. ### 🗒️ Notes - Framing - Contribution has been implicitly redefined to mean “direct to core” outputs. - Social signals used: commits, badges, props. - Necessity of a rubric - Large communities need filtering heuristics to triage feedback. - Risk: rubric becomes gatekeeping when it equates legitimacy with core artifacts. - Breadth of contributions - Tutorials, blogs, YouTube, social threads, meetups, friendships, informal groups. - These contributions drive adoption, skill-building, and community cohesion. - Case example: tutorial authors - Prolific educators with zero direct core commits still materially grow WordPress. - Author’s experience - Earned Core Contributor badge by co-writing the “What’s New” release page. - Badge perceived as code legitimacy; produced imposter syndrome. - Later code contributions alleviated mismatch between perception and pathway. - Limits of badges - Fun and motivating, but not indicative of current involvement or total impact. - Absence of badges ≠ absence of contribution. - Call to reflection - Examine biases about who “counts.” - Expand listening and recognition to non-core contributors. ## 📖 References: - Original article: https://aurooba.com/on-being-an-open-source-contributor/ - Mention: Tuesday Letters newsletter. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: - On rubrics and discounted opinions: - Original idea: Communities need a system to sift feedback, which often asks if someone has “earned” influence via real contributions; if not, their views get devalued. - Paraphrase: Given the volume of input in WordPress, filters are practical, but they frequently prioritize voices with visible project credits. When those proofs aren’t present, perspectives tend to be sidelined. - On badges and real involvement: - Original idea: Badges are fun and rewarding but don’t reveal current engagement; people without badges can be impactful contributors who helped make WordPress enormous. - Paraphrase: While profile badges celebrate direct contributions, they’re a poor proxy for ongoing participation. Plenty of educators and promoters, absent any official credential, have been central to WordPress’s reach and influence. ## 📰 Newsletter: Learning web development is more than writing code—it’s joining an ecosystem. This week, we’re spotlighting how contributions beyond commits power WordPress: tutorials that demystify the block editor, threads that clarify release changes, and community meetups that onboard first-time contributors. Recent updates: keep an eye on release notes and documentation refreshes; if you teach or write, your work accelerates adoption for everyone. Community highlights: shoutout to educators turning complex PHP and Gutenberg concepts into accessible guides, and to local meetup organizers creating welcoming spaces. New plugins worth a look: lightweight performance boosters, modern block patterns, and accessibility helpers that improve UX out of the box. Want to deepen your impact? Share a mini-tutorial, answer one forum question, or propose docs edits. Not every contribution compiles—but all of them compound. For a thoughtful read on broadening what “contributor” means, see “On being an open source contributor” by Aurooba: https://aurooba.com/on-being-an-open-source-contributor/ ## ✅ Action Items: Tailored prompt for your role and goals: - Purpose: Connect each article to open-source advocacy, contributor engagement, education, and your path toward OSPO leadership. - Use this prompt with any article you analyze: - “Analyze how this article advances a sustainable, inclusive WordPress/open-source ecosystem. Identify: - Advocacy: What policies, practices, or narratives does it promote that improve contributor recognition, governance transparency, or sustainable funding? - Contributor Engagement: Which contributor personas (code, docs, education, community, design, product) are supported, and what barriers are addressed? - Education: Where are opportunities for curriculum, onboarding pathways, or learning materials that reduce time-to-first-contribution? - OSPO Alignment: What cross-functional practices (metrics, recognition frameworks, compliance, community health indicators) could an OSPO formalize based on this article? - Transparency & Inclusivity: Which biases, gatekeeping patterns, or access gaps are surfaced? Propose interventions and KPIs. - Action Roadmap: List 3–5 initiatives you (as GoDaddy DevRel/aspiring OSPO Director) can pilot, including stakeholder map, success metrics, and sustainability plan.” - Alignment for this specific article: - Advocacy: Broaden definition of contribution; propose recognition beyond badges. - Engagement: Create pathways for educators, content creators, and organizers. - Education: Develop contributor curricula recognizing non-code skills. - OSPO: Implement multi-dimensional contribution taxonomy and reporting. - Transparency: Publish recognition rubric; report contributor diversity across roles. ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - H1: Recognizing non-code contributions - Summary: Being an open source contributor is not solely defined by direct contributions to the core project. While code contributions and official roles within the project are often seen as the highest form of contribution, there is value in the wider open source community. Thought pieces, tutorials, conversations, and offline interactions all contribute to the growth and success of open source projects. Badges and official recognition do not necessarily reflect someone's current involvement or contribution to a project. It is important to examine our biases and expand our definition of what it means to be an open source contributor. - URL: https://aurooba.com/on-being-an-open-source-contributor/ There are a lot of ways to contribute to the world of open source. Since the community around WordPress is the one I primarily hang out in, I’m going to centre my thoughts around WordPress, although I think these thoughts are applicable in any open source community around the web. I’ve been noticing a new-ish assumption around what open source contribution means, lately. Both in my own thoughts and also in what I see being echoed around the web – that to be considered an open source contributor you have to officially and tangentially have created something *directly* connected to the core open source project. For example, this may mean a code contribution that gets merged into WordPress Core or a piece of writing that made its way into the official press/communication/blog hosted on the main website of the open source project. I see people dismissing the opinions and thoughts of people who they don’t consider contributors, or people who don’t have enough commits, badges, or props directly inside the core WordPress project, which is certainly one of the easiest ways to identify an open source contributor. #### The Rubric Of course, I completely get that in a community as large and varied as WordPress, we cannot listen to every single person and give every piece of feedback equal weight. We have to have some kind of rubric or system to sift and filter through all the messages, feedback, comments, and reviews to find the ones that are worth giving attention to – that are valuable. And so in doing so, we’re often considering, “Has this person earned the right to have their opinion matter by way of making real contributions to the project?” And if the answer is no, their opinion is discounted, dismissed, or devalued. However, the open source community is *much much larger than that*. What makes open source projects so powerful and so valuable is all the open source and free work that *surrounds* the project. The thought pieces on people’s blogs, the tutorials on people’s websites and YouTube channels, the ongoing conversations on social media, the offline friendships and groups that form, etc. I have known and learned from prolific WordPress tutorial authors who – for the longest time – never contributed anything to the WordPress project directly; not a line of code or an edit to a marketing page, nothing. And yet, their work propelled the growth of WordPress itself and empowered numerous people to build entire careers on top of WordPress, because of their tutorials and articles. #### Earning my Core Contributor Badge There was a time where I, myself, sought out legitimacy as a contributor by amassing [those WordPress.org badges](https://profiles.wordpress.org/aurooba/). I first earned the “Core Contributor” badge because I helped write the “What’s New” page of a WordPress release – you know that page you see when you update WordPress and it showcases what’s new about that version? I fell into that [Marketing Team](https://make.wordpress.org/marketing/handbook/about/) meeting accidentally and helped out because I just *happened* to be there. The context here is, most people associate the Core Contributor badge with contributing *code* to the project, which still to this day is considered the highest form of contribution to an open source software project (and a topic to tackle for another day). Imagine the imposter syndrome I felt when people were impressed that I had that badge. It was only later that I contributed *code* to the project and finally stopped feeling like a fraud for having that badge. The badges on those WordPress.org profiles are great and lots of fun to see when you contribute something very directly to the WordPress project. And those are fun little digital rewards for sure, but they don’t really tell you anything about someone’s current involvement in the project. Don’t think for a second that someone without badges can’t be an open source contributor. There are plenty of folks promoting WordPress out there, teaching it, and creating work with it, without ever having directly putting anything into the core project. Without those people, WordPress would never have grown to be as big as it has or become an engine that drives such a large part of the web. I’m not saying I have an answer to this slightly troubling trend. We all *do* need a way to sift through all the comments, thoughts, tweets, and posts on the internet and decide what deserves our attention. I’m just saying, it’s maybe a bit troubling what we’ve unconsciously decided is the definition of a contributor – of someone who’s opinion matters – and maybe we need to examine our bias around it. *This article first appeared in my newsletter, Tuesday Letters. Sign up below.*, On Being an Open Source Contributor, Aurooba, 01hasqccx14svy60xvn7w9r9ph.