Most of the talks that I attended at Open Source Summit last week in Denver were in the general category of recruting and mentoring of new contributors. This is a bit of a brain dump of that content.

The first talk I want to highlight was a panel session featuring Dawn Foster, Ruth Ikegah, Matt Denny, and Suah Khan, titled “First PR to lifelong impact” What particularly stood out to me here was the following:

Clearly identifying a specific skill, or goal, for which you are trying to recruit is so much more valuable than just saying “Come help us!” It can be very intimidating to be asked to simply look around and find something to do, but when you’re asked to do a specific thing, there’s none of that initial confusion as to where you’re going to be useful. If you want to help a project recruit, have informal conversations with various people about where they could use help, or what isn’t getting done.

Don’t underestimate the value of recognition. Saying thank you, publicly as well as privately, is what keeps people around. List contributors in your release notes, even if they only did something small.

Present your information in multiple formats. Just because you prefer to learn by reading doesn’t mean that’s the “right” way. Short format videos are more appealing to (some) younger people. Provide a prominent “Prefer video?” link on your text content, and vice versa. Some people just want the facts. Some people want to talk to you, while some prefer to never have to talk to anyone. The more formats you can provide content in, the better, but there’s definitely a tradeoff with maintenance costs.

The next two things that I went to are a lot to summarize.

I went to Emily Shaffer’s talk “Nowcomer … but not new”, which was one of the most valuable presentations I’ve been to in ages. She does a lot of what I do – mentoring experienced programmers who are new to open source. Her notes/slides are HERE. I will post the video here once it’s available. Her practical tips about teaching people how to do the weird uncomfortable things that open source requires were just fantastic, and I can’t really do them justice. The main thing for me, though, was trying to get folks to understand that their internal goals and deadlines are completely uninteresting to open source projects, and trying to use those as motivation won’t work – you have to find ways to appeal to *all* users, not just yours.

I also attended a mentoring unconference. The notes from that are HERE. The section on mentoring non-code contributors was particularly valuable, with lots of practical tips about how to motiviate people to contribute to open source even if they don’t much care about software. In particular, more clearly communicating what problems your software solves, and for whom, was a recurring theme. And helping, say, a lawyer understand the kind of impact that their work would have, helping *millions* of people rather than the handful their daily work reaches, can be powerful motivator.