07-13, 15:00–15:30 (America/Chicago), Zlotnik Ballroom
Behind every successful open source project is a strong contributor community. What makes these communities strong? What can you do in your OSS project to nurture a thriving contributor community? In this presentation, we will share insights from the work of the Contributor Experience Lead team (NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and pandas) and discuss why designing and providing positive contributor experience is vital to sustainability of each individual project and the SciPy ecosystem overall.
Behind every successful open source project is a strong contributor community. Engaging and supporting contributors requires specialized knowledge, experience, and time commitment from project leaders. However, a chronic lack of resources and time often inhibits them to focus on this work. Recognizing these challenges, in late 2021, we created a team of Contributor Experience Leads to support contributors to the four foundational libraries in the Scientific Python ecosystem: NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, and pandas.
In this presentation, we will share insights from the work of our team and discuss why it is vital for project maintenance and sustainability. We will examine what we have identified as primary goals and priorities for a Contributor Experience team in each project, taking into account project size, structure, and governance model. We will also discuss how this work could be applied to other projects in the SciPy ecosystem.
Finally, we will talk about the Contributor Experience Project (https://contributor-experience.org), a community of practice and an open-source community-led project dedicated to developing best practices for onboarding and supporting contributors to open source.
Melissa is an applied mathematician and former university professor who fell in love with open source communities. She has been involved with the Python and PyData communities for some time, with a focus on outreach, education and DEI. She works at Quansight as a Senior Developer Experience Engineer, is a maintainer for NumPy and SciPy, and believes in the power of contributions beyond code.
Inessa is building bridges between people, open science, and open source software, advocating for diversification of contribution pathways to open source and supporting its social infrastructure. Passionate about the transformative power of collaboration out in the open, she has been organizing the Maintainers Summit at PyCon US since 2020 to foster best practices on how to maintain and develop sustainable open source projects and thriving communities. In her current role as NumPy Contributor Experience Lead, Inessa’s primary focus is on onboarding and supporting contributors, addressing gaps in the project governance, and developing programs to diversify pathways of contribution to the project.
Noa have been involved with the R and PyData communities for some time, with a focus on community building and DEI. They are a member of the NumFOCUS Board of Directors and DISC committee, PyLadies Organizer, and chaired the PyData Berlin 2022 conference. In addition, they are a Lead Data Science Coach at neue fische, contributing to pandas, and are currently developing the Contributor Experience Community and Handbook with Inessa Pawson and Melissa Mendonça.