Types of contributions

Question: What types of contributions are being made ?

Multiple, varied contributions make an open source project healthy. Many projects have community members who do not write code but contribute in equally valuable ways by managing the community, triaging bugs, evangelizing the project, supporting users, or helping in other ways.

Objectives

A variety of contribution types can demonstrate that a project is mature and well-rounded with sufficient activity to support all aspects of the project, and enable paths to leadership that are supportive of a variety of contribution types and people with varying expertise beyond coding.

Implementation

How contributions are defined, quantified, tracked and made public is a challenging question. Answers may be unique to each project and the following suggestions are a starting point. As a general guideline, it is difficult to compare different contribution types with each other and they might better be recognized independently.

The following list can help with identifying contribution types:

Writing Code
Reviewing Code
Bug Triaging
Quality Assurance and Testing
Security-Related Activities
Localization/L10N and Translation
Event Organization
Documentation Authorship
Community Building and Management
Teaching and Tutorial Building
Troubleshooting and Support
Creative Work and Design
User Interface, User Experience, and Accessibility
Social Media Management
User Support and Answering Questions
Writing Articles
Public Relations - Interviews with Technical Press
Speaking at Events
Marketing and Campaign Advocacy
Website Development
Legal Council
Financial Management