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Hacktober? Any Month is a Good Month to Contribute to rOpenSci

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The title of this post refers to Hacktoberfest, a month-long event organized annually by Digital Ocean to encourage contributions to open source projects on GitHub. Unfortunately, this October, many maintainers are dealing with spam pull requests. So instead of issuing a general appeal to participate, we’re pointing you to our new Community Contributing Guide’s section dedicated to our open Issues List. Along with showing you how to find help wanted issues in rOpenSci packages, it provides suggestions on etiquette to maximize the chances that your effort will be appreciated by a maintainer.

In 2019, 117 people made their first-ever GitHub commit to rOpenSci. We are excited to welcome code and non-code contributions from new and more seasoned coders at any career stage, and in any sector.

For package authors

For potential contributors

Many of our packages are developed by people working in research environments where software development is a voluntary, side project. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t get an immediate response. It will depend on the popularity of a package and whether maintaining it is part of a person’s “day job”.

Advice from maintainers in the rOpenSci community

Our Community Call on Maintaining an R Package was a panel discussion with maintainers of both very popular and niche packages talking in part about how they handle contributions. The summary post, by Janani Ravi and Steffi LaZerte, is a goldmine of links to specific segments of the video and collaborative notes on responses to questions like:

January to December

Any month is a good month to contribute to rOpenSci! Find out where your personal motivations to contribute align with our mission and our community values, and choose your path through the rOpenSci Community Contributing Guide.

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: rOpenSci - open tools for open science.

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