Here is the link to my open source contribution: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sahana-eden/3j2QmiDifJM

This was an interesting experience for me. I’d spent a great deal of time looking into possible open source projects that I could contribute to, but I found that this was a difficult task to do. I oftentimes felt as if I was on the outside about to jump into a mix of something that I didn’t entirely understand, and this is what typically would drive me away from an open source project that I felt I could contribute to; even after reading what a project was about, I often felt there was terminiology or a context that I didn’t completely understand or know how to contribute to. After a great deal of searching for a project that was appropriate for someone at my level, I decided to try to contribute to Sahana Eden.

From my research on trying to find good open source projects for beginners, I discovered that documentation tasks were a good way to get your feet in the water, so I searched for these. This is the text description for my task: “Review the flow & navigability of the wiki and send an email to the groups.google.com/group/sahana-eden list with any improvements that you would like to make. Have a look at the TitleIndex – you’ll see User…, Developer…, Blueprint… pages arranged oddly, and some pages with no general topic.”

I figured that this was easy enough and would be a good way for me to familiarize myself with the project and try to better understand more about what the project was doing. The main things that I noticed were that the dates on certain pages and instructions seemed out of date, but these posts were coupled with more current findings and updates about what the project was working on. Looking at this mix, I was a little confused about which parts of information about getting involved and current goals were correct. However, I did feel that reading through the website and looking for things that needed to be changed helped me better understand Sahana and get to know them. I also worked to install their developer’s version of Sahana onto my computer, but as some of the installation package was not current, this did not go as planned; there are certain versions of the program that I’ll need to download manually. I let them know that I was working on troublshooting this for myself as well.

Submitting my findings to the actual Google Group forum where everyone submitted their information was honestly the most challenging, and a bit terrifying, part of this project for me. I knew that experienced programmers would be reading what I had written, and after reading an article they recommended about asking intelligent questions and making sure you look things up before contributing to the community, I felt very intimidated. It was incredibly awkward to go through their website not really having a complete understanding of their most important focuses and then offer some of my feedback about their Wiki. It was with these goals in mind that I tried to frame my contribution as an introduction, what I had gleaned from their website, and discussed that I would like to work further with them in the future if they had more tasks appropriate to beginners.

I was surprised how quickly I got responses from people in the group and how nice they were too. They seemed appreciative of my interest, but as I was a beginner, they agreed that I wouldn’t be able to contribute too much yet. They did offer some places for me to go to and experiment with, so I think that after exams are over I might give it a shot. It wasn’t as bad as I had expected.

Overall, this was an experience with mixed feelings. The hardest part was actually finding an open source project to contribute to, and even after I’d contributed, I still wasn’t sure if what I was doing was completely right. Are there resources that exist for helping people ease in to open source contributions? From what I’d found on the Internet, they’d recommended finding something you’re interested in, but I found it difficult to find something I was interested in that was at my level. I should probably look into this further. I also felt uncomfortble talking to a group of people who had a clear understanding of the project, but I think it was good for me at the same time, as it challenged me to try something new. I think that I might try to continue to contribute to Sahana in the future, but I think that I first need to brush up on my coding skills and better understand the terminology surrounding the project.