Workshop

Working effectively with community contributors

Monday, 19 May 2025 @ 12:05 - 13:00

In the early days of an open-source project, you might be excited to see any community contributions. But as a community grows, many of us feel swamped by incoming pull requests. Even if the volume is manageable, reviewing low-quality PRs can be a drag, and maintainers often push off community PR reviews in favor of other priorities. Even promising work may sit unreviewed for weeks.

Let’s brainstorm how to do better! I’ll kick things off with a brief look at how we manage our contributor community at Zulip, where every major release has code contributions from over 100 people, with a core team of less than 15. I’ll talk about how we treat the contribution process as a product in its own right, and our focus on teaching contributors communication skills. We can also chat about onboarding, documentation, the review process, prioritization, etc.

Please come with your questions, insights, and stories to share!