Empowering Collaboration in the Commons

In the past few months I have been privileged to attend Wikimania 2019 and the Google Summer of Code 2019 Mentor Summit. At these events I was overwhelmed with the amount of care and effort people are putting into their projects and communities.

At Wikimania 2019, I was impressed with how much overlap there is between the Creative Commons and Wikimedia communities. Both communities are actively engaged in expanding the content and participation in the commons--in the collection and communities empowered by open content. I have a lot of hope in what existing and future collaborations will allow. At the conference, I got to see just the tip of the iceberg representing volunteers’ work across the globe. I hope we at Creative Commons can continue to keep the demands of our daily workloads in perspective and increase collaboration with the global effort.

At the GSoC 2019 Mentor Summit I was able to attend a good number of sessions on increasing and maintaining participation. Based on the session discussions and the work already being done by other organizations, I expect we’ll pursue the following strategies:

• Improved support for first timers--people who are engaging with code repositories for the first time
  • Improve tagging of issues
  • Dedicated documentation
• Improve support for GSoC and Outreachy program applicants
  • Provide application templates
• Participate in social media networks to actively recruit groups who are underrepresented in FOSS (free and open source software)
• Collect anonymous demographic data

A couple of organization examples:

• Public Lab: Community toolbox
• Python Software Foundation: Python GSoC – Home

Thank you to the community and the work you're doing <3

Originally Published

Originally published Empowering Collaboration in the Commons — Creative Commons on GitHub.