Accompanying slides
Make your open source project awesome is a workshop designed to help kick-start open source projects (or indeed, projects which aren’t yet open source but exist as ideas or as closed code).
Many journals require that scientific / research code to be open source in order to be published, but simply sharing source code alone isn’t usually enough to draw in new users and contributors. This session will discuss how researchers and coders can make their open source code repositories inclusive and welcoming to contributors.
Suggested activities
This aims for an approximately 90 minute workshop
What is Open Source? (5 minutes, crowdsource answers)
👥 Group Exercise: What makes open source good? (15 minutes)
In groups of 4-6 people, write down on sticky notes:
🙅♀️ Better avoided Have you ever participated in an open source project (or indeed any collaborative project) where things were a bit of a mess? Write down things that open source projects should try to avoid.
💬 Group feedback - each group nominates one person to share their group’s main points & we discuss as a group (20 minutes)
Recap - List top 5 actionable things that we could add to a new-ish repo to improve it. (5 minutes)
👥 Group Exercise: share your repo + offer group feedback (45 minutes, 15 per person)
In groups of ~3 people, share your code repo and give your groupmates a few minutes to look through it.
Each groupmate should suggest 2-3 things to improve in the repo.
Are there files that should be added?
If the files already exist, do they cover everything they need to? Are they easy to understand?
Each groupmate should suggest 2-3 good things in the repo
Help your group-mates take pride in their work. What bits are good? Is there anything we should emulate?