Partner Projects Programme Retrospective Report
The Partner Projects program is an effort to provide FOSS Hack participants with time and mentorship to be able to contribute to existing open-source projects.
The primary objective of this programme was to strike a balance between fostering connections with existing projects in the ecosystem and attracting new contributors, all while aligning with FOSS Hack’s vision of sustaining open-source projects, along with bringing up new projects.
The Season of Commits project was proposed to take this activity to a greater scale. The partner projects’ program in question was used as an experiment to better understand different aspects important to this aim. It sought to examine community response, project maintainers’ expectations and involvement levels, and, most significantly, how contributors would perceive the program.
Let’s start with expectations
Given the challenges in setting proper expectations and execution during the previous year, I established the following baseline expectations for the upcoming program:
- Kickstart interest in the cause
- Bring visibility to some niche community FOSS projects
- Achieve a minimum of 15-20 quality pull requests throughout the entire program
- Start small by onboarding up to 10 projects
On the planning front, find the thread with updates.
The outcomes
The most possible metrics are the numbers themselves:
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Community FOSS projects onboarded | 9 |
| Commercial open source projects onboarded | 4 |
| Interests for contributions | 63 |
| Projects contributions | 17 |
| Total PRs created | 61 |
| Projects contributed to | 9 |
Projects that received PRs:
- Compilerd
- Internet Shutdowns
- Keyshade
- Kitty
- Vyaakaran
- Hoppscotch
- Phase
- Raven
- Vibinex
The good
The outcomes exceeded expectations to a significant degree, indicating that the experiment was successful. Several additional positive factors emerged:
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Curating a set of recommendations for projects to adhere to, serving as a benchmark for potential partner projects.
- These recommendations were segregated into levels, aiming to fine-tune projects to make contributions more welcome.
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Code-walkthrough sessions:
- Hosted code-walkthrough sessions for 6 open source projects. These were held publicly on Jitsi Meet for live Q&A, and then recorded for future use as resources for contributors.
- Special mention to @SphericalKat, @Shree_Kumar and others for joining some sessions to share valuable feedback and support.
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Created a list of open source projects along with their curated list of issues and discussion forums. This list can be used as a reference for issues beyond the scope of the programme as well.
The pitfalls
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Despite a 2-month planning period, the active phase of the programme lasted only about 1 month. This included a maximum of 15 days for participants to understand projects, scope issues, and then contribute during the 36 hrs of hackathon. This timeframe is relatively short for understanding and contributing to complex projects.
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4 projects received no contributions despite extensive resource curation efforts: FreeCAD, Amaze File Manager, OCaml, and Listmonk.
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Unfortunately, FreeCAD received 2-3 spam pull requests, and we shared an apology note regarding the incident on the FreeCAD forum
Feedback
(Shared by maintainers and contributors)
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Both maintainers and participants noted the short timeframe of the programme as a challenge.
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Many projects received high-quality contributions:
- Projects like Phase and Keyshade mentioned that contributors followed up with them after the hackathon about further contribution opportunities.
- Akash Hamirwasia noted that the programme resulted in good contributions to his project “Vyaakaran”.
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Kovid Goyal applauded the efforts to encourage participation in open source and give people experience writing real-world code for actual working projects. He was glad to contribute in his own way.
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The Hoppscotch team provided positive feedback, stating that the programme struck a good balance between empowering people to contribute to FOSS and helping contributors navigate the process. They expressed enthusiasm for seeing more similar initiatives from the foundation.
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The Vibinex team appreciated the initiative and offered constructive feedback on how contributors could improve communication with project maintainers.
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Some projects faced challenges with contribution quality:
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Some pull requests were not up to the required standard, and contributors didn’t follow up after receiving reviews.
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Projects like Raven and Vibinex reported that some contributors weren’t active enough after receiving feedback.
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The Phase team conveyed that they had a great time interacting with developers from various backgrounds and were happy to onboard some new contributors on the project. They suggested creating a beginners’ manual for FOSS contributions, covering topics such as:
- Evaluating issues for contribution
- Committing code effectively
- Creating informative pull requests
- General etiquette on issue boards
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Communication challenges:
- Some contributors reported difficulties in effectively communicating with project maintainers, citing significant gaps between responses.
Evaluation process and rewards
The contributions were initially evaluated by the project maintainers, who provided feedback and recommendations.
Contributions to commercial projects:
For commercial projects, the awards were determined by the projects themselves. These awards will be given only after the pull requests are fully reviewed and merged into the projects (noting that reviews for these projects can take considerable time). The maintainers will have full leverage on the contributions to be awarded.
The rewards could be in form of:
- Recognition
- Cash prizes
- Internship opportunities
- Potential job offers
Contributions to community projects:
For community projects, each team’s contributions were collectively evaluated as a single hackathon entry. These were then assessed alongside other hackathon projects by the FOSS Hack jury. Although these contributions didn’t qualify for the cash prize pool due to strong competition from other projects, several deserved special recognition:
Overall, this experiment served as a valuable reference point to understand the considerations to keep in mind when hosting contribution programmes. Some key insights for future initiatives include:
- Explore ways to maintain ongoing engagement with projects and ensure steady contributions continue.
- In addition to large-scale contribution programmes like Season of Commits, consider hosting small-scale programmes:
- These could focus on one or a small number of projects, potentially improving the quality of contributions through increased focus.
- Such programmes would be less intensive to host and could be run independently by FOSS Clubs or city chapters etc.
A big shoutout to all project maintainers, contributors, volunteers, and the wider community for fostering the partner projects programme so well. This wouldn’t have been possible without the extended support and feedback that we’ve received from the FOSS United Community.
Cheers to the next steps ahead!