Why someone contributes to open source?

The Open Source Way 2.0 guidebook describes some of the diverse motivations that lead individuals to participate in open source communities, including:

• Extrinsic motivation: contributing to OSS is part of their job, career advancement by developing code that it’s in the open or to collaboratively solve a problem they are facing.
• Intrinsic motivation: a sense of purpose while contributing to a cause that is beneficial to a community, collaborative learning and the perceived professional benefit that it produces.

While intrinsic motivation is the kind of altruist behavior usually associated with OSS contributions, extrinsic motivation and rewards also play an important role on encouraging and recognizing the diverse forms of contributions an open source project wants and needs.

Here at the Paketo Buildpacks project, we’re glad to introduce the Contributor of the Month initiative, briefly described in this issue, we also want to elaborate better in this post about how it’s designed to work:

Goal

We aim to recognize different types of contributions to the Paketo Buildpacks project by giving contributors:

• A shoutout at the first Working Group meeting of the month and also at social media
• Adding them to the Contributors of the Month wiki page [TBD]
• Shipping them a kit including a Paketo Buildpacks t-shirt and stickers

Logistics

We plan to recognize contributors in three different categories:

• Code contributor (merged PRs)
• Content creator (tweets/blog posts/screencasts/presentations/podcasts)
• Community advocate (participation on community meetings/providing user feedback/creating or commenting Slack interactions,Github discussions or issues)

Code contributions will be tracked using the shoutouter script.

While content and community support contributions will be tracked by the Paketo community team, feel free to share in this Discussion about any contribution you have made to the project. It all counts!

Candidates will be added each month to a list from which the Paketo maintainer’s team will select a winner using a simple voting system. Remaining candidates will be migrated to next month’s candidate’s pool.

There are no minimums to make it to the list, so learn here how to start contributing and help us build an even better experience with Paketo Buildpacks!