It's great to see your proactive approach in outlining your focus areas and seeking community engagement. Building upon our recent discussions, I wanted to provide some additional thoughts and resources that might assist you in your onboarding journey:
Visibility on the Forum and GitHub
Being more present on the forum and GitHub will be invaluable. Engaging with new contributors on GitHub and sharing your intentions and thought process (see this post by Eliz Ayer on this topic) will foster collaboration and further strengthen our community.
Triaging and Grooming the Issue Log
Dedicating focused time to triaging the GitHub issue log will help familiarize yourself with existing issues and our labeling practice. This 2023 forum post on label cleanup is helpful as it offers insights into our labeling conventions. Also, during the last Barcamp, we discussed approaches to managing timelines and expectations around bug and feature requests.
Feel free to reach out if you need help or ask questions directly on the relevant issue. You might also consider organizing a “triage party” with other contributors; it could be a great way to learn from the community and share insights collaboratively.
Prioritizing Work
Based on our recent conversations and the scope outlined in the job posting, here's a suggested prioritization for your efforts:
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Community Engagement & Contributor Support. Focus on responding to forum posts and GitHub interactions. This should be your top priority initially, with the expectation that this workload will decrease as you become more familiar with the project and community dynamics.
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Ticket Triage and Pull Request (PR) Review. Use this time to build a strong understanding of the existing issue landscape and gradually review PRs as you gain confidence.
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Bug Fixes & Quality Improvements. Approach this work in the following order of priority:
- Reviewing and fixing bugs in OpenRefine.
- Undertaking maintenance tasks that support contributors, such as improvements to Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, documentation, style guides, Integrated Development Environment (IDE) setup, and in-code comments.
- Exploring feature issues highlighted from recent surveys and community discussions
Your initiative to hold regular office hours is appreciated. It will create a space for questions, pair programming, and collaborative learning, which aligns well with our goal of fostering an inclusive and supportive community.
Please let me know if you want to discuss these points further or need clarification. Your contributions so far have been greatly appreciated.