Outreach

by Asheesh Loroia

How the Fedora design group does it

  • Provide contributor bounties

  • Tries to get in a new contributor every two weeks

    • offers help for new people
    • tries to get people of all levels
    • if you get three contributors you get a free t-shirt

How the SF rails group grew

  • Was at 2% woman
  • Ran women only or woman + 1 events
  • Huge turnouts!

Dos and Don’ts

  • Do: Decrease latency (and terror)

    • respond to mailing lists!
    • Set a deadline for responses

  • Do: Set goals

  • Do: Tell people what to do

    • assign bugs
    • Point them at existing issues

  • Do: Attach people to strong communities

    • Don’t just run single events
    • Keep things moving forward forever

  • Do: One-on-one interviews

  • Don’t: Talk about how much you hate doing X

Conclusions

  • Demographics reinforce themselves
  • Exploit the biases in your outreach

Next steps

  • All it takes is effort
  • Run a meetup outreach effort
  • Run a starling bounty for your project
  • Put your project on OpenHash
  • Ask for help: http://asheesh.org/pycon11