Enhancing Your Contributor Growth Strategy With Dawn Foster  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Business of Open Source]] - Full Title: Enhancing Your Contributor Growth Strategy With Dawn Foster - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/7ac20d09-4860-4246-949f-0d7dfa37bdeb ## Document Notes ## Highlights - Episode AI notes 1. Showing appreciation and engaging with contributors can encourage them to become regular contributors 2. The Kubernetes project has a contributor experience group that focuses on growth and offers programs like shadowing, mentoring, and documentation 3. The chaos project welcomes new contributors and offers non-coding opportunities to get involved ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/episode-takeaways/39b745d3-a8da-44f1-832a-9235044e7948)) - Encouraging Regular Contributors and Successful Strategies To encourage casual contributors to become regular ones, it's important to show appreciation for their contributions and engage with them. One example of a project with a great contributor growth strategy is the Kubernetes project, which has a special interest group focused on contributor experience. They offer programs like shadowing, mentoring, and documentation. Another project that excels in this area is the chaos project, which is welcoming to new contributors and offers various non-coding opportunities. Transcript: Speaker 2 Is there anything else that you can do proactively to move people from casual drive-by contributor to regular, aside from like, don't do something that's going to like drive them away, But rather, you know, something that you can do to actively encourage them to become regular contributors? Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on the project and depends on the type of contribution that they've made. But I do think that, you know, showing appreciation for it, and I think, you know, if you get somebody who's contributed one thing and they, you know, you really like their coding style, They, you know, they did a great job, I think that, you know, encouraging them to come back and do more and maybe pointing them to other issues that are similar or, you know, asking them If there are other things that they're interested in and contributing. And I think that really that engagement with people can be a proactive way to encourage people to stick around and make more of those contributions instead of doing their one thing and Then disappearing. Speaker 2 Do you have any examples of a project that has a really awesome contributor growth strategy? Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a good question. I think a lot of projects don't really have it written down. So I would say that it's kind of, you know, spread out across the project. So I think that the Kubernetes project does a really good job. They have a whole special interest group focused on contributor growth. It's called the contributor experience special interest group. I think that that group does a really nice job of putting together actual programs that help people stick around in the project and they have things like, you know, shadowing and mentoring And documentation. And so, so there's a lot of things that that group does that are focused on getting contributors to stick around and growing contributors and making sure that they're having a good experience. So I think that group in particular is really good. The other group that I'm part of that I think does a really good job with this and we don't really have a contributor growth strategy written down. But the chaos project is a really sort of friendly place for new contributors. So we get a lot of people who are brand new to open source contributing to the chaos project. And it's just one of those projects that's really, really pretty friendly to newcomers because there's lots of stuff you can do that you don't necessarily need to write code. You can define metrics. We have lots of programs people can get involved in before they start contributing code or maybe they never contribute code to the project. Speaker 2 Excellent. ([Time 0:25:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/022a5af6-e470-42c9-950a-96ede122bb76))