I don’t know either¶

Folks often feel lost getting into open source, getting into maintaining…

How am I supposed to know what to do?

I think one of the biggest things we can do to help is be totally straightforward: 90% of the time, I don’t know either.

Django gets about 5 new issue reports a day, every day. When I was a Django Fellow, it was a core role to triage these tickets: are they valid?

Imagine, some report about, I don’t know, how read-only fields are rendered in the admin UI. Can we change it so that X?

Say it with me: I don’t know.

The only option was to roll-up my sleeves and dig in. Sometime later I’d be able to say something sensible. Most times at least.

But all that work was largely invisible. I know because I see it on other repos when I report an issue, from the outside it looks (if you don’t know better) like I just had that final answer to hand before I began. That I just knocked it off.

The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. I didn’t know. Letting people see that can make contributing feel an awful lot more accessibile.

In my Getting Started Contributing to Django Workshop that I’ve run at a few DjangoCons, I try to get people to take the time to really dig into a issue. I say they need to become the world expert on that issue. By doing that, it’s clear how they can have something to offer, even though they only just started contributing.

I think the same applies to new maintainers. I don’t know either, so it’s OK that you’re not sure what you need to do here. We’ll work it out.

I think that can help with the initial fear. It’s OK. We all feel like this.

What else can we do here?

Want to chat about this? Over here 👋