Initially, the prospect of contributing to an open source community Felt daunting, I have never done anything like this before and I did not think my coding knowledge was strong enough to actively make an existing software better. My first step, therefore, was to better understand the open source process and how to engage with a community.
First, I contribute to the first-contributions github project which walks users through their first GitHub contribution, forking, cloning, modifying, pushing, and finally pulling the contribution to the main repository. This made me feel more confident about contributing to an open source project and navigating github. I am also less likely to make beginner errors it might get help contribution which will make my pull requests more likely to be accepted and insures I am not wasting their communities time with beginner problems.
Next, I read through a few guides to contributing to an open source project. Again, what I learned from this made me feel far less daunted by the process as I realised not every contribution has to solve a major problem or bug, but instead can be something smaller while still helping a community. This also pushed me in the direction of looking for ‘good first issue’ issues on GitHub.
After Reading these guides I began to feel more confident about approaching a specific issue and community. I decided to contribute to the generative AI community as it seems that much of the future, including the future of my employment, will be determined largely by how generative AIs progress. Chat-GPT in particular seems to be putting many jobs, including technical and creative jobs like those I wish to be a part of, in jeopardy. Now, whilst chat-GPT is not open source developers are able to use its API to build chat bots. I decided, therefore, that I wanted to contribute to one of these chat bots so as to better understand how they can be used to both manipulate and spread information. I also wanted to understand the community as I feel I will probably be involved with them in my future career.
When I initially reached out requesting my issue I did not ask the developer questions about his purposes for the chat bot and his incentives for making it. In hindsight, this was a mistake. It was only after I had finished my contribution the that I began to consider how my code may be used. Going forward, I will be more actively involved in any community I am contributing to before I begin my contribution to ensure their values align with my own.