Pathway from consumer to contributor

[pllim]

We often get requests like "I am very interested in astronomy and/or OSS and I want to contribute" or "I love using astropy and I want to contribute," followed by "how do I start?"

Alternately, we get direct comments from new people on existing open issues such as, "Can I work on this?"

Just throwing contributing guide at them seem to have little success. Sometimes a few brave ones go on ahead and submit PRs but some of the PRs had to be thrown out because they were incomplete or not the desirable fix. The PRs that got further also went stale and needed maintainers to wrap up, though most of the times the stale-bot just stepped in and closed it.

What else can we do to increase the percentage of PRs merging from first-time contributors?

This is a pre-cursor for:

• Pathway from contributor to maintainer #445

[jduckles]

There are a lot of ideas from the Astropy Community Engagement Report in the voices of people who wanted to contribute more. https://astropy-report.orgmycology.com/sections/4_improving_participation

We talked about creating skills maps:

All OSS projects tend to struggle with getting users across the threshold to being contributors. We encourage Astropy and its community manager to develop and visualize pathways to becoming a contributor so that newcomers and long time users can easily see the steps they need to take to make contributions. This effort begins with identifying the common personas of existing community members. For example:

• Novice user (e.g., students)
• Engaged user (e.g., researchers who use Astropy in their work)
• User-novice contributor (e.g., users who contribute to documentation)
• Developers and Maintainers
  • Junior
  • Intermediate
  • Senior

Building out these archetypes with the skills required to move between them–perhaps by using skill and mastery rubrics–and making these visualizations available to community members alongside learning resources can make the pathway less daunting for those who wish to contribute more to the project.

It is important to develop these pathways in such a way that does not inhibit new, unforeseen talent flowing into the community. Across our research with Astropy and other communities, we’ve seen how the “old guard” can preference skills and approaches that have been valuable in the past (and may remain valuable today) to the exclusion of different abilities that may add value. This issue may become increasingly important as advances in other domains (e.g., AI and machine learning) filter into the astronomy community.

@pllim If there is scope in an upcoming funding cycle, I'd love to work on this and try to help Astropy close these loops for those keen to contribute.

[pllim]

there is scope in an upcoming funding cycle

I think this will be on the 2025 roadmap (cc @astropy/strategic-planning) but funding is currently uncertain (cc @astropy/finance-committee). Thank you for reaching out!