Open Source Community Africa (OSCA), a community that believes in open source software made available for the public and aims to improve the rate of contribution and development of OSS by increasing credible contributions by African creatives. Since contributing to open-source comes with a lot of opportunities for software developers, designers, technical writers among other people in the tech space to improve their skills by working in OS projects that are real-world projects.
This week the OSCA's open-source challenge 2021 begins. the challenge will run from 16th August to 6th September. This aims at helping creatives:-
- to get started with contributing to Open-Source projects
- give participants greater chances to be accepted in Open-Source internships like Outreachy Internships whose application for December cohort is open, Google Summer of Code, among others.
- Get recommendations and network with creatives in the OSCA community.
At end of the challenge, participants are expected to:-
- write an article about their experience during the challenge i.e how they found projects to contribute to, selecting issues, and creating /having PRs merged successfully.
- submit merged PRs at the end of the challenge and 20 successful winners will be selected and awarded amazing prizes.
To participate in the OS challenge:-
- read through this article for resources and guidelines from OSCA
- check OSCA's Github org for the guidelines on how to contribute, suggestions of projects you can contribute to among other resources.
- join the OSCA discord server.
- fill this form in order to be considered as a contributor and to get constant reminders about the challenge.
To get started with the OS challenge
- find open-source organizations that you can contribute to depending on your programming language or tech stack(developer/designers etc) and the niche of the problem you want to solve.
- identify issues with beginners-friendly/good-first issues mark
- For designers, you can check: Open Design, Mozilla Open Design on Github or search design issues on Github explore you might find logos, branding design issues, among others, especially for blockchain projects.
- if you like contributing to documentations of OS projects check: Awesome OSS Docs
- For developers you can find OSS projects & issues on this sites: Github Explore search your favorite programming language/design/writing/etc then click issues on the results given, up-for-grabs, code triage, open source Friday, Ninja Framework, First Contribution, Source Sort, pull requests
Once you have identified the project and you have been assigned an issue by the project maintainer read the contribution guidelines on the project's Read ME(How to contribute) section follow the given steps or you can do this:
// forked repository
$ git clone (https-or-ssh_key:link-to-the-forked-repository)
$ git checkout -b branch-name
$ git remote add upstream link-to-the-main repo
$ git pull upstream master
$ git commit -m "commit message"
$ git push -u origin HEAD
Thank you for reading through remember open-source contribution is a great way of building your skills, giving back to the community and you can have it as a full-time career you can different bounties of different organizations. Also with the growth of blockchain technology projects, there's a rise of GitHub issues that need contributions by developers and designers since blockchain projects(crypto/Defi/NFTs) are all open-source projects. Just choose your niche and start contributing to beginner-friendly issues.