ASSIGNMENT 1: Report on your experience contacting and explaining your intention to contribute to the community. Did you follow a 'script'? Was it a formal or informal process? Did you face any barriers to participation? Do you think your experience was personal or general? Please include in your post links to opening conversations with the open project. Include any relevant mailing list posts, wiki edits, and forum/issue tracker contributions.
How I got involved with Hypothes.is
This first assignment is a bit odd for me, as I currently work for Hypothes.is, and naturally want to continuing contributing to the project for this class.
I'll be interested in hearing other's experiences getting involved with projects, and hope to get some useful take aways on how best to structure a project to get the most useful contributions, but for the purposes of this first assignment I'll talk about how I got involved and ultimately hired by Hypothes.is.
I was working on a project and looking for open source annotation to use with it, and after much googling I eventually stumbled across the Hypothes.is project. The project had big aims and a good start to its code base, but I didn't really give it much thought until Peter Brantley came to speak at the I School. We wound up having a great talk and I offered to intern at Hypothes.is that summer (for free, thanks to the Berkeley non-profit internship grant). At the end of the summer, I was hired to continue on for as many hours as I could spare while in school.
In summary, it was a chance encounter with a project very much in its infancy. There were so many things that needed to be done, I just jumped in and started doing them. This is a very different perspective from trying to contribute to something that's already established, but just as interesting. More to come in future posts!