"Good First Issue" Tags for Welcoming Newcomers

Motivation

GFI or "Good First Issues" are a good way to start on an OSS project. Several GitHub repositories use this label to encourage new contributors to start helping the project without the necessity, in most cases, to contact one of the contributors in advance or to have a deep knowledge of the project architecture or content.

It is a way most people find to enter the OSS world or into a particular topic. This tag can break the first barrier of insecurity (impostor syndrome) that most new and most experienced developers have, believing that OSS contributions are only for highly skilled people. Impostor Syndrome is also a well-known mental health concern among ethnical minorities and women, and breaking this first "fear" can make people more interested and motivated to contribute.

Some guidelines, like the one proposed by the NLnet, a recognized philanthropic non-profit foundation according to the Netherlands Tax Authority (see more Diversity Guidelines), mention the GFI is a good form to attract new contributors.

A more diverse community can bring different ideas, different ways of perceiving a problem or seeking a solution, and create a more empathic community (more here). Stimulating the Apache community to embrace different people with different backgrounds can lead to a better and more open-minded place.

Objective

The objective of this initiative is to, together with other Apache Org projects, adopt the "good-first-issue" tag in the GitHub project repositories to create a more welcoming way for newcomers to contribute to the project.

How can I identify a GFI in my project?

GFI's are normally simple tasks that can be accomplished detached from other dependencies. It can be a small code enhancement, documenting internal functions, creating small APIs to connect services, documentation, and others.

How to get started?

This initiative proposes to reach some Apache Org projects and, together with them, select and tag the best GFI, and share it in social media through the Apache blog posts, each project's preferred communication form, and so on.

If you and your project team are interested in participating in this initiative, please reach the Diversity team on the mail list dev@diversity.apache.org or in the #edi slack channel. The interested project and the progress of picked GFI tags will be displayed on this page.

What needs to be done

Reach and select the interested Apache projects
- See on reports the most open projects to do so.
Build an internal plan with them to select the GFI's
- I think it will depend of each project structure. After selecting the projects, we can revisit this item.
Contact the marketing team to help spread this info?
- Make a blog post?
- Encourage people to share it?

Participating projects

In Progress

Projects that are already doing it for a long time

Those are few projects that we know of that have been doing it for quite some time and the approach is pretty successful for them. Feel free to reach out to devlist/other forums for those projects if you would like to ask them for their experience. Note that for projects on Github you can easily find all such issues in "contribute" page of the project. This page has links to contribution guidelines if projects have them and are often referred to by any sites that have advice for people to start contributing. This is described in Github documentation: