Notice: The WebPlatform project, supported by various stewards between 2012 and 2015, has been discontinued. This site is now available on github.

supporting new contributors

How we support new contributors

Coordinators

When a new contributor volunteers, assign a coordinator who:

  • provides a warm welcome
  • offer to walk them through getting registered and picking a property.
  • let the know about channels of communication
  • point out some key pages or tips and tricks
  • adds newcomer username to this page
  • follow up with them in a couple of days to see if they were successful.

Helping contributors with CSS properties page

  1. WebPlatform Wednesday we pick a bundle of CSS property articles for that week
  2. To prevent people from being intimidated by a blank page, we create stubs for those articles, with the link to the specification where you will find the basic information to start from; I would hope we could automate this with a script (it would be nice to also insert the topic cluster)
  3. We put the word out for contributors, on this list, on the blog, on Twitter, on the CSS public mailing list, among our companies, in the site notice, etc.; we direct them to this email list, or IRC or Twitter if they are not into email
  4. When people show up to commit, we have designated “greeters” for each page (one of the core community folks who knows how to do things will each take 3-5 pages to be responsible for), who recruits, trains and encourages the contributor, removing roadblocks and facilitating quality contributions
  • If we get more contributors than we need, we pull a few more articles into the list
  • If we don’t get enough contributors, we either ask the existing contributors to take on a little more work, or we make a new call, or we adjust our goals (date or amount)
  1. Once a contributor has finished their task, they tell their greeter, who make sure the next stage happens (typically, review), and they take care of the “paperwork” in the Giant Scary Spreadsheet
  • We ask the contributor to tweet about their contribution, to give themselves props and to spread the word; we retweet these from @webplatform
  1. The next week, we take stock on what actually happened, how much got done and what wasn’t done, and we pick the next set of articles
  • We blog about the progress, and about the next set of work. (Rinse, repeat; apply praise liberally.)

Split the work down into more discrete, manageable tasks:

  • basic facts, such as overview table, syntax, and values
  • explanatory text, such as the introduction (summary), usage, and notes
  • examples, with explanations
  • review, and flagging and unflagging
  • links to tutorials and other materials (either inside WPD or on the wider web)

Each contributor might sign up for one or more tasks for one or more articles; you only want to fill in basic facts? Great, take 3 or 4 articles, that will probably go quick. You are good at a more creative, time-consuming skill like explanatory text? Ok, maybe you should only commit to 1 or 2 pages. You like making examples? Pick 2 or 3 articles. You want to do the complete page? Okay, pick 1 and go to town.

Compatibility table information is not in this breakdown; we will soon have automated compatibility tables, so we should discourage people from trying to edit this manually for now.

Help budding writers

People think it’s easy to just copy and paste. But actually, it’s just as easy to think on your own. People just need to know how to proceed.

Ask new contributors if they want help breaking down how to edit their first page. Something like:

  • Find the page that needs creation
  • How to read a spec to pull out the necessary information
  • Fill in the basics, like the values and types
  • Researching reputable sites, such as MDN
  • Look at other sources for inspiration, such as tutorials, blogs, github
  • Then play with it yourself in code.webplatform.org
  • Pick some examples from your experimentation that illustrate how to it work in common-use, real0life situations
  • Then, describe how you can use it
  • Don’t fill in the compat info, that will be done automagically later
  • Focus on the details, on the examples, and referencing the right specs
  • If you see other great content elsewhere on the web, don’t copy-and-paste it, add links at the bottom of your page
  • Then, let the world know you have a draft up and ask for feedback, seeking out experts, tweeting in the community, etc.