Supportive Tasks
This page lists "reusable" or "multiple use" tasks that we are encouraging collaborators to do, to learn how to be part of a healthy and supportive collaborative community. All Public Lab reviewers, mentors, and project leaders do these tasks and we are very happy to share them.
It feels great to help someone else learn some new skills and feel good about their contributions! 🎉
You can help your mentors out by taking on these supportive tasks! This will both allow you to contribute to the open-source community, and decrease the load on your mentors!
As part of our ongoing work to welcome newcomers, we need to help them make well-formatted pull requests, and troubleshoot the issues they encounter. You should leave your feedback in the comments of the PR.
This will help newcomers get started in a codebase they may not be familiar with, and help get PRs ready to merge! 🔍 🕵️
Task type: Coding
Links: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/3458
With so many new contributors (yay! 🙌) we need help reviewing newly submitted code! One way to help is to download someone's code and take a screenshot to confirm it works. You should only upload screenshots on PRs where people are inactive for more than one week if needed. Also note, you will not get extra points for uploading screenshots inside your own PR. Please don't upload screenshots to PRs which already have screenshots.
But most importantly, upload as many screenshots as you want (as long as they are helpful) 🎉
This will help newcomers get started in a codebase they may not be familiar with, and help get PRs ready to merge! 🔍 🕵️
Task type: Documentation
Links: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/3513
As part of our ongoing work to welcome newcomers, and to produce more welcoming first timers only issues, we need to add URLs leading to specific lines of code, to many issues.
This will help newcomers get started in a codebase they may not be familiar with, and help get issues closer to completion! 🔍 🕵️
Task type: Documentation/Training
Links: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/3424
One way we've been doing this is through first-timers-only issues, which are written in a very engaging, welcoming way, far differently than the usual "just report the bug" type of GitHub issue. To read more about these, check out firsttimersonly.com (the lead image is from their site), which really captures how and why this works, and is beginning to be a movement in open source coding outreach! Beyond the extra welcome, this also includes getting such well-formatted issues out in front of lots of people who may be contributing to open source software for the very first time.
It takes a LOT of work to make a good issue of this type, and we often walk through each step required to actually make the requested changes -- the point is to help newcomers understand that a) they're welcome, and b) what the collaboration workflow looks like.
This will help newcomers get started in a codebase they may not be familiar with, expand our community, and help get issues closer to completion! 🔍 🕵️
Task type: Documentation/Training
Find different suggestions/bugs in various fields like testing, coding, documentation etc. and create an issue for them. This will help in doing early bug fixes.
This will help users to use bug free code. This will increase the overall experience of the users with Public Labs.
Task type: Coding/Outreachy
Links: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/3460