FOSS Motivations: Joining NumPy
Past experiences and future goals drive us to take on new personal projects, self studies, and roles in various organizations. Joining a FOSS project is no exception, and the reasoning behind contributing to open source software has been proven to be fairly consistent among all developers.
Reasons for Joining a FOSS Project
While the reasoning behind my team’s backing of NumPy was set in stone from the course requirements, all of the members were led to the project and its community based on common interests. The dominating factor was education; we wanted to learn more about the library (as it has been used in past classes, hackathons, and personal projects) and Python. While getting to know the community through their newsletter and Slack channels, we also learned that the community members would also be valuable resources (mostly for educational purposes).
Numpy’s notoriety peaked the interest of the group members as well. Seeing that the project was always accepting new contributors, we quickly did our research and wrote up a report to focus our motivations and reasons for how we could successfully learn from joining the team.
NumPy Community
One of the biggest factors in our FOSS project search was an active and experienced community that would be able to onboard a group of inexperienced students. Some of the projects that we reviewed included TensorFlow, OpenMRS, FreeCodeCamp, and Django. While many of these communities were big, experienced, and active, the opportunities to integrate into the different communication channels were sparse. This was a major downside since we were interested in these libraries for the opportunity to consistently talk and ask questions with the core members of these programs. NumPy offered this outlet and more. The group Slack has numerous channels including a newcomer’s channel that is managed by one of the core members of the community. With an easier transition into the community, the team and I were able to change our motivations from completing an assignment for a class to learning more about successfully contributing to FOSS projects.
