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Open Source: What It Is and How to Contribute

Dr. Jan Pearce

Section 7.2 Friendly Communities

The following are open source communities with a reputation of being friendly to novice contribution. Be sure to follow the recommendations given in Section 7.1 for getting started well.

Subsubsection 7.2.1 Firefox

The Mozilla Firefox Browser
 1 
mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/faq/
proclaims itself to be the only major browser backed by a not-for-profit that doesn’t sell your personal data to advertisers while helping you protect your personal information.
To get started contributing to Firefox:
  1. Read Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines
     2 
    mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/
  2. Make an account at Bugzilla
     3 
    bugzilla.mozilla.org/home
    .
  3. Carefully follow Getting Set Up To Work On The Firefox Codebase
     4 
    firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/index.html
    .
  4. Read and follow How To Contribute Code To Firefox
     5 
    firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/contributing_code.html
    .

Subsubsection 7.2.2 CHAOSS

CHAOSS stands for Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software. The CHAOSS project
 6 
https://chaoss.community/
focuses on creating metrics, metrics models, and software to better understand open source community health.
To get started contributing to CHAOSS, check out the project’s Quick Start for New Contributors
 7 
https://chaoss.community/kb-getting-started/
. It recommends that you start by:
  1. Joining the CHAOSS Slack team, including the #newcomers channel.
  2. Attending a few CHAOSS Newcomer Hangouts.
  3. Attending some weekly CHAOSS Community Meetings.
These activities should help you determine which CHAOSS project you might like to contribute to, as well as next steps you can take down that path.

Subsubsection 7.2.3 PreTeXt Authoring Software

PreTeXt is an XML-based authoring and publishing system for authors of textbooks, research articles, and monographs, especially in STEM disciplines. One of the many wonderful aspects of PreTeXt is that anything authored in this softwere is designed to be highly accessible so can be printed to the web, on pdf, in Braile, and more.
To get started with PretTeXt, do the following:
  1. Read the Contributing
     8 
    github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
    Guide    , and join the mailing lists described in the PreTeXt Contributing Guide.
  2. Read the README
     9 
    github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/blob/master/README.md
    .
  3. Install the PreTeXt-CLI
     10 
    pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/processing-CLI.html
    .
  4. Look for typo-level issues or issues marked by good first issue in Pretext Issue Queue
     11 
    github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/issues

Subsubsection 7.2.4 Runestone Academy

The mission of Runestone Academy
 12 
landing.runestone.academy/
is to make modern textbooks freely available to all (i.e. to democratize textbooks for the 21st century.) To accomplish this mission Runestone has partnered with many institutions, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as many professors and other professionals to make high quality interactive textbooks in multiple languages available to all students for free.
To get started contributing to Runestone textbooks themselves, go to Runestone Academy Repos
 13 
github.com/orgs/RunestoneInteractive/repositories?type=all
, and look for textbooks. You will need your development environment set-up to build the textbook, either using Runestone git
The following textbooks are known to be friendly to novice contribution:
Before trying to contribute to the Runestone Academy UI or database backend, it is best to gain practice contributing to books. To contribute to the Runestone Academy UI:
  1. Read the README
     22 
    github.com/RunestoneInteractive/rs
    and fork the repo.
  2. Read the Contributing Guide
     23 
    runestone-monorepo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing.html
    , paying particular attention to the required code style and linting section.
  3. Follow the directions on the Developing
     24 
    runestone-monorepo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/developing.html
    page.
  4. Join the Discord
     25 
    discord.gg/f3Qmbk9P3U
    channel.
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