As the Hyper project keeps growing, it’s important to realise when it’s become bigger than one person. The best open source projects are build around a collection of individuals who are all motivated towards a shared goal of success: having a group like that makes a project less likely to die, more likely to accurately reflect the needs of its users, and incentivises people to want to work within the project to improve it, rather than build something totally brand new outside it.
Now that we’re up to more than 45k downloads per month across the set of Hyper projects, we need to face up to the reality that the ongoing good health of the Hyper project relies on building a community of people who care about the project as much as the core team do. That’s why, starting today, we’re inviting you to become one of the team.
One Of The Team
To build an open source community, you need to create a place where people feel like their work is valuable, and where people feel like their contributions are welcomed. For that reason, it’s important to lower the bar as much as possible to new contributors, and to create as small a distinction as possible between new contributors and the “in” crowd.
To achieve this, we’re going to open the doors to our “in” crowd. We’ve created a GitHub team, contributors. This team has write access across the project, giving them the ability to push branches, merge pull requests, and generally help in the long-term maintenance of the project.
How do you get into this team? It’s simple: land one commit.
That’s it. There are no extra bars to leap over: if your commit is a single character typo fix, that’s enough. The goal here is to make it clear to you that your involvement is important and that you’re making a difference to the project. We want to empower you to make good decisions, and to give you a voice in the direction of the project.
This is a obviously a bit of an experiment. We’re placing enormous trust in our contributors. We expect them to behave sensibly and cautiously: to treat these projects as important, and to be careful with their behaviour. But it’s been my experience that when you treat other people as sensible adults, they behave like sensible adults.
So we’re going to try this for a while. I’m personally pretty excited to see what comes out of it. Ideally, we build a community of people who care about and understand these projects, such that the maintenance work can get shared evenly around the community and so that we can capitalise on the talents and skills of a more diverse and varied collection of individuals.
So please, come along and help. Whatever it is you’re good at, or whether you just want to learn, we’ve got a place for you. Let’s build something fantastic together.