About this Talk
Truly open source projects tend to grow in an organic way, there is not a lot of planning or a big roadmap ahead. If the project turns to be successful, is (in part) thanks to the value it brings to the users and the talent of the maintainers.
Nevertheless, let's not fool ourselves, an open source project is nothing without a community and a group of contributors, an open source project lives thanks to them. Building a community is hard, but getting contributors is even harder. Writing code and putting things together is the easy part, however, creating an environment where others can write code and contribute it to a project is extremely hard. But... do all contributions to open source need to be code? What about contributions to documentation? Do meetups and presentations that raise awareness about the project through word-of-mouth count?
The Selenium project has identified the need to improve how people can get involved and contribute to the project. A completely new way of running the project was established through a governance document, where detailed steps on how to get involved are described, in a completely transparent way. In addition, a set of automated features has been developed, which facilitate the onboarding and recognition of contributors. Overall, the Selenium project is focusing on finding ways to make every contribution count and recognize the value in all of them.
In this talk, Diego will go over all the improvements the Selenium project has implemented to open more doors to contributors, how a new project structure has been defined to ensure the longevity of it, and of course, a few details about the technical future of Selenium.