Valerie Aurora
Valerie Aurora is a software engineer with 25 years of experience in open source software, currently working as a systems consultant for Bow Shock Systems in Amsterdam. She began her career as a Linux kernel developer specializing in file systems and networking. As co-founder of the Ada Initiative, she co-wrote and drove the adoption of codes of conduct in open source software. In her spare time, she writes quizzes about networking protocols and watches Dutch reality TV.
Session
A significant source of stress for maintainers and contributors to open source projects is mismatched expectations around credit and feedback for contributions. Sometimes a person makes a contribution representing months of work, only to have a maintainer lightly rewrite it and take sole credit. Other times a maintainer is overwhelmed by work, has no time to review unsolicited contributions, and is accused of plagiarizing work they never saw. And sometimes people game the system by sending large numbers of low quality, computer-generated, or plagiarized contributions to artificially inflate their apparent qualifications.
This talk describes one way to reduce this source of stress: a written contributions policy laying out what contributions are welcome, how they will be handled, and how the credit will be distributed. We will present a contributions and credit policy creation guide written by members of the RIPE Open Source Working Group which can be adapted and reused by open source projects.
The contributions and credit policy guide is available at: https://github.com/contribution-credit/policy