Low-code contributions through GitHub - Isabela Presedo-Floyd, Mars Lee, Melissa Weber, Mendonça, Tony Fast, Quansight Labs

This resource first appeared in issue #94 on 01 Oct 2021 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Working With A Research Community: Other

Interesting experience getting people who wouldn’t normally code to make contributions to a project via github. In this case, the effort was around alt text for images (including scientific diagrams!) for a project, based on pull requests, but I could imagine it working well for documentation, sourcing diagrams, or other contributions.

The team’s process was:

pre-meeting preparation with a project contributor and meeting facilitator
a crash course in the specific topic - eg alt text for images
an introduction to a collaborative pull request created by a project contributor
group working session to suggest changes to specific files assigned in the pull request
a short review of the submissions by the core contributor
final review by the core contributor to submit a final pull request

Github’s web interface is pretty approachable (with some guidance) for making these kinds of contributions - it’s good to see that it works well.