You ever go to link a blog post and realize you never actually finished the post? That happened to me yesterday with my #FOSSBackstage talk. So today I finished/published said post.
I present: Six Ways to Onboard New Contributors
https://relational-tech.com/blog/six-ways-to-onboard.html
It rounds up my best suggestions for welcoming newcomers:
- context-building tasks
- FRAME tasks
- tasks that utilize newcomer ignorance
- tasks that utilize newcomer expertise
- pairing
and most important: letting new contributors "just be"
@shauna a fantastic post.
One thought - a really useful thing that builds on your “review the onboarding docs” can also be as simple as use the app and contribute back the perspective of a new to the app user. In a lot of cases I imagine that would be exceptionally helpful for a project who likely mostly engage with active users and only occasionally with a new user beyond the “get setup” phase
Then can help with manuals, translations (including into industry specific jargon etc)
Yes! New user feedback and new contributor feedback are two great tastes that pair well together. @baconandcoconut and I once organized an event called SpinachCon where open source projects signed up and we helped them run volunteers through new contributor onboarding, new user onboarding, or both. I wrote about it here: https://relational-tech.com/resources/spinachcon.html
(Sorry to delete and re-draft on you, my website is new and built from scratch and I had to fix a bug in the opengraph formatting)
@shauna no worries! Great idea and concept and now one less bug.