Open Advice/Being Allowed to Do Awesome

Being Allowed to Do Awesome

by Lydia Pintscher

in: Open Advice

This text is available under the CC-BY-SA license. (see also: Open Advice/Info)

Contents 1 about the author

Free Software has an enemy. It is not who most people on the Internet think it is. No, it is a lack of active participation.

Every single day there are thousands of people out there looking for a way to put meaning into their life, looking for ways to do something that truly matters. Every single day thousands of lines of code for Free Software projects are waiting to be written and debugged, programs are waiting to be promoted and translated, artwork is waiting to be created and much more. Sadly, far too often the people fail to connect with projects. There are several reasons for that. It starts with people not knowing about Free Software at all and its benefits and purpose. But we are getting there. People are starting to use and maybe even understand Free Software on a large scale. Free Software projects live by converting some of those users into active contributors. This is where the problems begin.

I have managed hundreds of students in mentoring programs and have been doing outreach in various forms for Free Software projects. I’ve worked with enthusiastic people whose life was changed for the better by their contributions to Free Software. But there is one theme I see over and over again and it breaks my heart because I now know what talent we are missing out on: not being allowed to do awesome. It is best summarized by what a fellow Google Summer of Code mentor said: “The insight that most people in Open Source didn’t get allowed to work on stuff but just didn’t run fast enough at the right moment seems to be rare”. Potential contributors often think they are not allowed to contribute. The reasons for this are many and they are all misconceptions. The most common misconceptions in my experience are:

• ˆ “I can not write code. There can not possibly be a way for me to contribute.”
• ˆ “I am not really good at this. My help is not needed.”
• ˆ “I would just be a burden. They have more important things to worry about.”
• ˆ “I am not needed. They must already have enough much more brilliant people than me.”

Those are almost always false and I wish I had known a long time ago that they are so prevalent. I would have done a lot of my initial outreach efforts differently.

The easiest way of getting someone out of this situation is to invite them personally.
“That workshop we are doing? Oh yes, you should come.”
“That bug in the bug tracker? I’m sure you’re the perfect person to try to fix it.”
“That press release we need to get done? It would be great if you could read over it and make sure it is good.”
And if that is not possible, make sure that your outreach material (you have some, right?) clearly states what kind of people you are looking for and what you consider the basic requirements. Make sure to especially reach out to people outside your usual contributor base because for them this barrier is even bigger. And unless you overcome that, you will only recruit who you are – meaning you will get more contributors just like the ones you already have. People like the people you already have are great, but think about all the other great people you are missing out on, who could bring new ideas and skills to your project.

about the author

Lydia Pintscher is a people geek and cat herder by nature. Among other things, she manages KDE’s mentoring programs (Google Summer of Code, Google Code-in, Season of KDE), is a founding member of KDE’s Community Working Group and is a board member of KDE e.V.