Open Source Research

#1

As an open source project and believers in collaboration to build a better future, there’s no doubt that the open source community is one of the biggest audiences we seek to reach as a project, so we put together some research about open source. Please feel free to add, suggest, and utilize!

Open source is a type of licensing agreement that allows users to freely modify a work, use said work in new ways, integrate the work into a larger project or derive a new work based on the original.

Recommended Read:

Handbook “The Open-Source Way” on building, growing and attracting community members and users, measuring success, and more.

What is an open-source community?

  • A loosely organized, ad-hoc community of contributors from all over the world who share an interest in meeting a common need, ranging from minor projects to huge developments, which they carry out using a high-performance collaborative development environment (CDE).
  • The open source community is diverse and highly motivated. Whether it’s development or advocacy, open source software and other collaborative projects benefit through, and because of, community.
    • Unlike traditional projects that require physical resources, sharing economies are generally only hindered by the number of people contributing to an effort and their ability to acquire and share knowledge.
    • This is where and how the Open Source Initiative helps open communities of practice. Their work focuses on creating and amplifying the network effect, where collaborative use actually enriches resources and the organizations that adopt them.
    • Their development efforts generate resources for collaborative organizations, to help create and maintain communication within and among open source projects; motivate and efficiently organize groups of remote individuals, and; cultivate an open ethos where the principles and practices of open source can foster collaboration, co-creation and community.
  • They value one of the most significant advantages of open-source software: getting enhanced through a strong community. Due to its open nature, it’s super straightforward to build a custom-fit solution based on already existing code, then (this is the best part) contribute back to the project by open-sourcing the new solution itself.

Where can we reach them Online & Offline?

Platforms

For New Contributors

  • First Timers Only.
    • A community-led mentorship initiative to help beginners kickstarting their open-source journey.
  • CodeTriage.
    • Triage in open source means looking at open issues and adding useful information for maintainers. CodeTriage helps by picking a handful of open issues and delivering them directly to your inbox.
  • 24 Pull Requests.
    • 24 Pull Requests is an annual community-organized event encouraging developers to give back to open source projects over the holiday season
  • Up For Grabs.
    • A beginner-friendly project to help you in open-source contributions. This is a list of projects which have curated tasks specifically for new contributors. These are a great way to get started with a project, or to help share the load of working on open source projects.
  • Contributor-ninja.
    • Contributor Ninja has a few repositories and lists of issues to which people can contribute.
  • First Contributions.
    • This project aims to simplify and guide the way beginners make their first contribution

Events & Meetups

Media

Projects & Foundations

What will speak to them from ThreeFold’s offerings?

Content Topics

  • Transparent & open-source technology
  • Zero-OS, our own decentralized operating system build from scratch on just a Linux kernel
  • Open-source Internet infrastructure – fully decentralized & foundational layer-0
  • Any workload that can run on Linux can run on the Grid as well
  • Highly compatible with industry-standard tools & frameworks = seamless migration
  • Infinite scalability & incredible edge capabilities
  • Playground & weblets, dApps
  • V as a language
  • Autonomous & self-healing IT, minimized hacking opportunities
  • Private and secure developer environment
  • Permissionless/smart-contract-based deployments
  • Incredible opportunity to be at the forefront of the movement & shape the future of the Internet – be an early adopter & builder, be a visionary

Communication & Content Activities

  • More hands-on tech updates on the forum & blog
  • Blog: Developer profiles “Behind the code” showing our developer team as well as community members contributing on GitHub or building/testing the Grid + insights into their backgrounds, their projects & responsibilities
  • Social media: Telling developers’ stories (similar to farmers’ stories)
    • Asking developers & open-source contributors for a 1-minute video sharing who they are, why they got involved in the project & how they’re building on / testing ThreeFold
    • Developers sharing their tools / dev tips for building on ThreeFold
    • Acknowledge people for their contributions in weekly/monthly shout-outs
  • Leveraging open-source partner communities like V, OpenNebula & CasperLabs
  • Open-source landing page & more actionable developer page for threefold.io
  • Creating specific spaces for developers & open-source contributors other than the testing group on Telegram or the forum (Bring back Mattermost? Give Discord a real try?)
  • Trying out developer blogging platforms such as Aviyel, Dev.to or Hashnode
  • Developer camps, trainings & hangouts
  • Working groups
  • Town halls & AMAs
  • Hackathons / buildathons & build challenges (could also test this with Twitter Spaces or Twitch)
  • Developer grants | GEPs for solutions / applications we’d like to see
  • Bug bounty programmes
  • Conference talks: have developers share about ThreeFold at events & conferences like Open Source Summit Europe, All Things Open, Open Source 101, Codeland or Upstream

Resources

Useful Links

2 Likes
ThreeFold Content Creation and Outreach Handbook