Unfortunately, good code won't speak for itself. Even the most elegantly designed and well-written codebase that solves the most pressing problem in the world won't just get adopted on its own. You, the open source creator, need to speak for your code and breathe life into your creation. That's where technical writing and documentation come in. A project's documentation gets the most amount of traffic, by far. It's the place where people decide whether to continue learning about your project or move on. Thus, spending time and energy on documentation and technical writing, focusing on the most important section, "Getting Started," will do wonders for your project's traction.
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How to Contribute to Open Source Healthcare Projects for COVID-19
By Joshua Pearce | April 15, 2020
Many of those that are familiar with the maker movement, including me, believe there is a significant opportunity to apply open source design principles and mass-scale collaborative distributed manufacturing technologies (like open source 3D printing) to at least partially overcome medical supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic...Many people agree there is enormous potential with the approach despite the challenges and have started to self-organize to develop open source hardware to fight COVID-19. The largest group is Project Open Air. They are a group of "Helpful Engineers" who have congregated to aid in the COVID-19 pandemic response by developing both open source hardware and open source software. The Helpful Engineers are working on medical devices such as open source ventilators, to create a solution that can be quickly reproduced and assembled locally worldwide. Read More »
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How to Create an Internal Innersource Community
By Jono Bacon | November 23, 2016
In recent years, we have seen more and more interest in a variance of open source known as innersource. Put simply, innersource is taking the principles of open source and bringing them inside the walls of an organization. As such, you build collaboration and community that may look and taste like open source, but in which all code and community is private within the walls of the organization. As a community strategy and leadership consultant, I work with many companies to help build their innersource communities. As such, I thought it could be fun to share some of the most important principles that map to most of my clients and beyond. This could be a helpful primer if you are considering exploring innersource inside your organization...
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How to Decide Whether to Open Source Your SaaS Solution
By John Mark Walker | September 7, 2018
Should a SaaS provider open source its primary platform, and if so, what is the best way to do it? The decision to open source code requires a fair bit of planning if you want to do it right, especially when it comes to user support and documentation. In the case of SaaS, the required planning is different, although it shares some factors with any open source effort. In my series, How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms, I focused on software that exists solely to be deployed on a computer, whether on a local machine, in a data center, or in a cloud platform (yes, I know the last two are redundant).
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How To Do Software Like Nasa, By Nasa
Robert McMillan | Wired.com | April 4, 2014
Forty years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Nasa open sourced the software code that ran the guidance systems on the lunar module. By that time, the code was little more than a novelty. But in recent years, the space agency has built all sorts of other software that is still on the cutting edge.
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How To Fix Healthcare.gov
Clay Johnson | Department of Better Technology (DOBT) | October 21, 2013
Late last night, the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services finally communicated with the public and let us know their plans on fixing Healthcare.gov with a “tech surge”. Their plan? Read More »
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How to Get Your City to Pass an Open Government Policy
Jason Hibbets | opensource.com | February 7, 2012
Today, the Raleigh City Council passed an Open Source Government Resolution, unanimously, promoting the use of open source software and open data. The resolution includes language that puts open source software on the same playing field as proprietary software in the procurement process. It also establishes an open data catalog to house data available from the city.
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How to Grow Healthy Open Source Project Infrastructures
By Elizabeth K. Joseph | March 30, 2017
In 2013 I joined the OpenStack Infrastructure team. In the four years I spent with the team, I learned a considerable amount about the value of hosting an infrastructure for an open source project in the open itself. In 2014 I gave a talk at All Things Open and was interviewed by Jason Baker about how we'd done our systems administration in the open. My involvement on this team led me to advocate for systems administrators to use revision control and learn about tools for working with a distributed team. At the OpenStack Summit in Austin in 2016, our team did a talk on navigating the open source OpenStack Infrastructure...
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How To Make Money With OpenStack
Sean Michael Kerner | Datamation | October 18, 2012
The open source OpenStack cloud effort isn't just about technology, it's also about money - lots and lots of money. Read More »
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How to Open Source Your Academic Work in 7 Steps
By Joshua Pearce | September 11, 2019
Open source technology and academia are the perfect match. Find out how to meet tenure requirements while benefiting the whole community. Academic work fits nicely into the open source ethos: The higher the value of what you give away, the greater your academic prestige and earnings. Professors accomplish this by sharing their best ideas for free in journal articles in peer-reviewed literature. This is our currency, without a strong publishing record not only would our ability to progress in our careers degrade, but even our jobs could be lost (and the ability to get any other job). The following seven steps provide the best practices for making an academic's work open source...
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How to Teach Undergrads How to Become Open Source Contributors Without Writing Any Code
Sebastian Dziallas | OpenSource.com | February 21, 2012
This is the story of a college class taught inside an open source community. Last fall, I taught Release Engineering to a small group of undergraduates at Olin College, an engineering school a few miles outside Boston. The goal was to teach them how to become functional technical contributors to an open source project--without writing any code. Read More »
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How to Use Content Marketing To Promote Open Source Projects
By Will Kelly | October 15, 2021
Both startups and more established firms are increasingly turning to content marketing as a way of reaching prospective customers. However, corporate marketers often consider the open source software (OSS) community a challenge to reach. This article features ways your technology and content marketing teams can work together to target and reach the community around an OSS project your organization supports.
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How to Use Libraries.io Data from Millions of Open Source Projects
By Benjamin Nickolls | August 3, 2017
What if we applied the techniques Google applied to index the internet back in 1998 to the world of open source software? That's exactly the thought Andrew Nesbitt had in 2014 which lead to the creation of Libraries.io, an open source project for indexing other open source projects. This month Libraries.io released metadata on over 25 million open source projects. You can download it right now from Zenodo, but what can you do with it? To understand what is contained within this dataset, I'll take a quick look at how it's collected. Everything in Libraries.io begins with package managers. We index project metadata from 33 package managers, filling in gaps from their source repositories where we can. We parse project manifests—a gemfile, package.json, or similar—that includes code from other projects and stores the links between them...
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How to Use Sphinx to Give an Old Book New Life
By Joshua Allen Holm | November 29, 2016
The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and Google Books are wonderful sources of historical books, but the finished products of their digitization efforts, while thorough and functional, lack that last bit of polish. For example, one of my interests is historical cooking, specifically Georgian and Regency British cookery and the contemporary period in American cookery, but the PDF versions of the relevant cookbooks are usually just basic black and white scans with no features that aid findability or searchability. The plain text versions, while more searchable, are not aesthetically pleasing and often contain numerous optical character recognition errors...
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How to Write Documentation That's Actually Useful
Steven Vaughan-Nichols | Enterprise.Nxt | July 10, 2017
Programmers love to write code, but they hate to write documentation. Developers always want to read documentation when they inherit a project, but writing it themselves? Feh! How common is this? A recent GitHub survey found that "incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem," according to 93 percent of respondents. Yet 60 percent of contributors to the open source code repository say they rarely or never contribute to documentation. Their reasoning, for both the open source projects and their own applications? A common attitude that "documentation is for 'lusers' who don't write good code!"...
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How To Write Effective Documentation For Your Open Source Project
By Kevin Xu | March 12, 2020
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