Project On Ramp

[alcarney]

Listening to the conversation at the start of this podcast really got me thinking. Quite often you hear about the "on ramp" - almost the welcome party for potential new contributors where you guide people through the steps needed to make their first contribution. Not only that but making the project feel approachable in the first place so people want to contribute to it.

On more than one occasion people have said to me that they have felt intimidated by code club - which let me say right now is not because of the people! But the fact that there is so much going on, just look at the website we have > 130 files in at least 10 different formats amounting to over 6000 lines of stuff!

Back when code club started the website amounted to about 3 lines of HTML in a single file. Those of us who have been here from the beginning have seen the website grow and evolve into what is it today and so the growth in complexity has been almost invisible. To anyone coming to this fresh sees a mature project with over 1000 commits, so I'm not surprised when they feel like they could never take part in it.

Going back to the podcast it made me realise that our "on ramp" is non existent, sure we've tried to 'encourage' contributions by mentioning the word in our README and putting up a few pictures on the website. But that's too vague chances are people don't know what they can contribute let alone how to do it.

So that brings me to the point of this issue I suppose, the start of "Project On Ramp" where we turn this around and do our best to encourage and guide new contributors into the project. From what I can gather we need at least the following:

• Great documentation across all the website, how it's put together and why
• A clear list of things that need doing - with tasks for all levels of ability. If we have a running list of concrete things that need doing then we have more chance of people pitching in and helping
• Tutorials on everything from cloning and building the website to making changes and submitting a PR

Finally @preetiks, @StephanieAngharad you are still relatively new to the project is there anything that you wish we had when you first looked at the website that would have helped you get going quicker?