Proposed Session

How to encourage your team members to contribute to open source?

Speaker(s)
Gaurav Kapoor
Level of expertise
Beginner
Session Type
Regular (45 min)

I am planning to talk about the importance of Open Source Contribution and how one can encourage more and more of their team members to contribute. Most of us who are part of the Drupal community or involved with any other open-source project understand the importance of giving back to the project and the benefits of that as well in the long run. In fact, when the team itself is an active contributor, the entire project is attempted in such a way that most of the requirements are achieved by using contributed modules, writing generalized custom code which can be contributed later on, and using information and patches from the issue queues whenever facing any problem. In case when the team members are not active contributors, they face various challenges such as evaluating which contributed projects to use, how to seek support, and how to extend already existing features. They miss out on everything which a regular contributor enjoys.

Based on my own experience of mentoring 50+ people to contribute to Drupal and being an active contributor myself, I would like to share my findings and tactics on how one can motivate their team members to contribute back. I will be explaining in detail what possible blockers the individuals/teams face and how those can be resolved. This session isn't going to be like a first-time contributor workshop, the focus will be more on what all changes a team or an individual can introduce in their company so that everyone is encouraged to contribute.