New to open source community

[Pradeep Sukhwani]

Hi there,

I'm new to the open source community. Although I use Django a lot in my 
projects I'm struggling to get into the open source community. As it's has 
been a month but still, I'm not able to understand how can I take a step 
into this open source community? Any help or suggestions would be 
appreciated.

--
Thanks
Pradeep Sukhwani

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Re: Widening participation (Thoughts from DjangoCon)

[Federico Capoano]

Hi everyone,

It's been great to read some good insights on this discussion.

How to attract new contributors from a different demographic (geographic 
area and age)? Good question.

I wanted to share with you my experience as (second year) organization 
administrator and mentor for OpenWISP  (an open 
source network management system built on top of Django) in the Google 
Code-In program , which I think can really 
help in attracting new contributors from a different demographic group, 
which is really great for a project, because brings in a more diverse 
perspective and fresh lymph and enthusiasm.

*Google Code-In* is the sibling of the *Google Summer of Code* (in which 
django participated several times), and it is a global contest in which 
pre-university students in the range of 13-17 learn how to contribute to 
open source.
It works as follows:

- some open source organizations are selected each year, the list of 2018 
participating orgs  counts 
some notable participants as Postgres, Drupal, Wikimedia, KDE, OSGeo, Fedora
- these organizations publish a series of tasks with the aim of helping 
students familiarize with their codebase and practices in order to start 
contributing
- each tasks contains information, tags and list available mentors for that 
tasks
- students can see the list of tasks in a dashboard, it is publicly 
available so you can also see it: https://codein.withgoogle.com/tasks/
- students choose the tasks they want to work on and they "claim" it, they 
then use the organization's support channels (eg: IRC) to interact with 
mentors and other fellows to look for help
- at the end of the contest, each organization chooses 2 winners and 4 
finalists who receive prizes, the 2 winners win a trip to Google's HQ in 
California

Tasks can be about coding, QA/testing, design, outreach/research, 
documentation/training.

This program brings some challenges and needs a lot of patience, but has 
been great for the OpenWISP community for the following reasons:

- we've been lucky to get some really great students, their skills for 
their age is just incredible (teenage prodigies really)
- they learn really fast, so total beginners become productive in 2 months 
while more skilled students become great contributors in no time
- the big influx of beginners who seem to all stumble on the same issues 
really helped us to understand which roadblocks had to be removed in order 
to improve our documentation and make it easier for them to onboard
- the demographic is really diverse, many students are from Asia but we got 
some great students from Poland, Russia and the Americas
- the contest runs online, worldwide and remotely, no physical presence is 
needed
- we've been able to close a lot of the easier issues and some very useful 
higher impact (non-trivial) issues
- just OpenWISP trained over 950 students in 2018 
, some of these 
students will become mentors next year, allowing us to train even more
- some of these students stick around and keep contributing also when the 
program ends
- they bring in a fresh perspective, helping us to keep the project modern 
and ensure generational handover (which I think it's an overlooked problem 
in today's open source community)

*One important note*: many of the good students of OpenWISP choose us 
because our system is built in Python and Django and they either already 
know and like this stack or want to learn to use it.

So I think having some Django mentors to participate in this program, 
either with a dedicated organization or under an umbrella organization, 
could be beneficial for Django and Open Source in general.

It's not a silver bullet, it's not a panacea, but it can help.

PS: in one of our training tasks we have our students do the DjangoGirls 
tutorial , they 
really love this task :-)

Federico

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