Topic 3: ‘community’

Introduction to community engagement

When we talked about what is important to an open source project in class, the topic that came first was community.

All open source projects have their way to keep their community engaged. It is important to do so as it is the community that keeps the project alive. I contributed to the Open Assistant Project, In this article I will explain how I came around understanding and taking part in this community.

Study of the projects community (link to in class teaching, channels management, Bus factor)

When seeing the GitHub page of the project, I found out that is is part of a bigger organisation called LAION AI that does research around artificial intelligence. After deciding to contribute I started by observing how the community functions and exploring their different channels. It was important to listen first to gain confidence.

This project uses different channels to gather interest and make the community grow.

This community mainly uses Discord to discuss and help each other.

There are channels for different topics and languages. This server is very active, users discuss different ML models data sources and other topics important to the project and they can also find people speaking the same language easily to talk together. The good organisation of this server makes the communication effective and it helps the project develop faster.

I noticed a lot of respect and mutual help between users. This is also important to the enhancement of the project. Users can ask for help and get support from other users without feeling pressure while doing so.

Community and contributing

When contributing I had to use some of these channels and communicate with members. I only had to use Discord and GitHub.

• Help from members (advice, feedback, criticism)

Being able to get help got very useful. I had an issue with one of the packages that was used in the project and I could get help on discord.

• Contributing together

I also used discord to communicate with the person I was contributing with. It was very useful to be able to call and work together easily.

• Recognition and appreciation of contributions/ respect

When submitting and asking questions on GitHub, The code owners were always very patient and thankful for any type of engagement and contributions which made me feel safe to send my code even if I wasn’t very confident about the quality as it was my first pull request.

Conclusion

The community around the project has been very useful to my contribution. I also saw the importance of respect between members. Taking part in this community was very fulfilling and gave me confidence to do more in the future.