blog:Calling all contributors

During our last contributor call, we decided that we would implement the All Contributors specification as a way to honour all our contributors.

If on the surface, a contributor call decision to honour contributors sounds like some sort of self-serving nonsense, let me reassure you that there's no risk of dislocated shoulders from patting ourselves on the back. Instead it's about (also) honouring those contributions that tend to go overlooked in Open Source.

The All Contributors website summerazes it as:

This is a specification for recognizing contributors to an open source project in a way that rewards each and every contribution, not just code.

People are giving themselves and their free time to contribute to open source projects in so many ways, so we believe everyone should be praised for their contributions (code or not).

When we talk about contributors in open source projects, there is often the assumption that this is all the people who contribute code to the project. The fact the GitHub lists the contributors of a project based on the actual commits goes a long way to cement that view.

But there's plenty of contributions that fly under the radar of an automated system based on the commit history. Things like documentation and blog posts, community building, answering questions or submitting bug reports, are all valuable contributions that deserve to be recognized.

By implementing the All Contributors specification, we pledge to give those people credit for their contributions, and make that credit visible. In practice the list of contributors will be included in the README.md file of all our packages, as well as in the main README.md file of our freesewing/freesewing monorepo.

In the future, we also plan to make this list available on our website.

How does it work?

Going forward, we will make an effort to add all contributors regardless of how they contribute to the project. But we'd also like to capture contributions that were made up until now.

For this, we need your help. If you've contributed to FreeSewing, let us know. You can let us know on Discord, or you can create an issue, or you can comment on any issue or pull request using the instructions for the all-contributors bot.

Don't be shy, add yourself :)