I have an idea for a contest, but I'd like your input! My rough thoughts so far:
The Goal
Contribute to an open source project in a way that is actually helpful, without recreating the free t-shirt fiascos of the past. Get audience members (and projects) involved more literally in open source collaboration, and
Wait, how should we count an entry as a contribution?
- I know people will try to fix typo's, so that doesn't count.
- Interactions to any project must be made in good faith. No trolling or disrespect tolerated.
- Only submissions made in a certain time frame will count, probably across two or three months.
- There will be some sort of limit on how many times you can submit.
- It might make sense to always ask the maintainer / follow an issue tracker, before submitting a pull request or other fix.
- Finding and reporting bugs should count when filed properly with logs, screenshots, etc. Might count towards a different prize.
- Documentation counts, but might even work towards a different prize than submitting code.
- Making a hardware device would also count if it is made available under a permissive license.
What projects and maintainers actually want our help?
This is a huge question, because we want this collaboration to feel useful as opposed to annoying. What is the best way to make the project a success for the project maintainers as well, instead of overwhelming them? Perhaps a list needs to be compiled of projects that actually want to take part in this...
Curious to hear your ideas! My basic thought is there will be a window to enter that lasts at least a couple months. Everyone who successfully partakes will be mentioned in a live episode, along with links to their submissions! We will make it into a fun discussion! Perhaps we can get feedback from the projects that accept these submissions.
What do you think? Thanks for reading this far.