2  Introduction

Making your first contribution to Open Source can be both empowering and yet very intimidating.

Steinmacher et al.1 identified 13 social barriers preventing newcomers from making their first contributions to open source software projects, including barriers related to Reception, Communication, and Orientation. We consider that most of these barriers are, in one way or another, related to:

  1. How easy it is to get set up to make a contribution

  2. How easy it is to find a task to start with

  3. How warmly first contribution is received

Therefore, to encourage and empower contributors, we created a new type of community event which supports specifically first-time contributors to open source software and translation projects. Our goal was to create an inclusive and supportive environment, which would result in a positive learning experience and empower participants to continue contributing.

We designed and piloted this new community event format based on pairing community calls to introduce the topics, and specialized hands-on coworking sessions (mini-translathons and mini-hackathons) to give opportunities for participation.

rOpenSci Community Calls are 1-hour online events with 2-5 speakers, 1 moderator, and include 20-40 minutes of discussion/Q&A. These calls serve to strengthen connections between members of the rOpenSci community, teach technical and social topics, bring different stakeholders’ perspectives to light, and identify unmet needs on a topic. Video, transcripts, notes and summaries of all our calls are published. We have hosted over 40 calls over the last 10 years and attract a global audience with representation from academia, government, non-profit, and industry. We have also started holding these events in Spanish (as of 2023) and Portuguese (as of 2024) to expand global accessibility.

Coworking sessions are informal, online, gatherings held once a month in rotating timezones. Each session features a different theme and Community Host with expertise in that theme, facilitated by rOpenSci staff.  At these events, participants meet other scientific software developers and experts, cowork on their own projects, and/or ask questions and receive guidance as they work. After each session we publish shared notes and resources. We have hosted over 40 sessions since 2021.

This book presents the experiences we learned through our pilot events, an overview of how to run these kinds of events, and specific details on how to run the community calls, mini-translathons, and mini-hackathons. In the Appendices we share examples and templates useful for running these events.

We hope this book will inspire and empower you to run your own events to support first-time contributors to open source software and translation projects.

  1. Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Conte, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, and David Redmiles. 2015. Social Barriers Faced by Newcomers Placing Their First Contribution in Open Source Software Projects. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1379–1392. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675215↩︎