Contribution Idea - collaboration with scientists

[Evan Czaplicki]

This weekend was the "Google Mentor Summit" which was an unconference for open-source organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code.

One of the things I noticed was that projects attract contributors with skills similar to the project itself. Biology projects attract biologists, environmental projects attract scientists, art projects attract artists, etc. That means each project is missing folks with all the other backgrounds, but between all the projects, we have a huge diversity of skills. They are just not evenly distributed.

So we have a lot of UI people, which is something that could be really interesting helpful for scientific projects in particular. We have Elm folks wondering "how can I build my skills?" and "how can I contribute in meaningful way?" I bring all this up to say two things:

1. I think our community could benefit a lot from looking out to other projects (particularly science related ones) and trying to help out with no expectation of reward. Building things in Elm and being kind to others is an extremely important way to contribute to this project. (I talk about that here, and I'd say some open source orgs at the summit really get that it's about the people and relationships and some really do not.)
2. I am going to be more conscious about building personal relationships with other project maintainers from different backgrounds. I already met some very wonderful folks with projects on ecology and space that likely have some very cool projects, and I'm going to try to see what I can make happen there.

Anyway, I think this lesson is important, and I hope it sparks some ideas out there! Do you like space? Environmental monitoring? Education data? Economic data? Go find projects around those. Obviously building a relationship and collaborating is not guaranteed, but there is definitely a huge need for UI skills!

[Rupert Smith]

On Tuesday, October 17, 2017 at 9:07:19 PM UTC+1, Evan Czaplicki wrote:

1. I am going to be more conscious about building personal relationships with other project maintainers from different backgrounds. I already met some very wonderful folks with projects on ecology and space that likely have some very cool projects, and I'm going to try to see what I can make happen there.

I would be interested to hear more about this collaboration with ecologists. I manage a small nature reserve and have a growing interest in ecology (more enthusiasm than knowledge, I know computers but ecology is hard). What do your ecologists need a UI for?

[Evan Czaplicki]

I met Jeff (bcc'd) from https://publiclab.org

I felt he had a great sense of the human aspects of open-source and wanted to find a way to help out.

As with any open-source project, making great contributions requires having good relationships with folks involved, so my gut says that the way to get involved is to start getting to know folks in that world!

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