How we found open source contributors
I think we found the best way to find open source contributors
This week, I wanted to take a break away from discussing MCP to talk about open source. For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been working on MCPJam inspector, an open source testing and debugging tool for MCP servers (please give our repo a star! ⭐). We’ve been able to consistently grow our user base and repo stars, but we hadn’t grown our community contributor account, an important metric in open source projects.
That was until I read this article “What 1,000 contributors taught me about open-source”. This article changed my perspective on growing open source projects and attracting contributors. In the past week, we’ve grown from 0 external contributors to 7 external contributors that have shipped 17 PRs.
Why do people contribute to open source
Open source projects are not sustainable without outside contributors. Projects with contributors will outlive the team / organization that created it. It also builds community and user growth, and gives the project more credibility.
I spoke to a couple of contributors to MCPJam to ask what their motives were to contribute. Majority of them wanted to contribute to build their experience and advance their careers. They also enjoy being a part of a dedicated community building something people love, and fun in solving challenging problems.
Tag easy issues as “good first issue”
The most effective way to get new contributors is by labeling issues on your GitHub repo as “good first issue”. This lets potential contributors know that that is a beginner friendly issue for them to get familiar to the codebase.
To my surprise, most of the new external contributors found MCPJam for the first time through “good first issue”. They found my project by deliberately searching for good first issues and taking them on. Labelling your issues as “good first issue” is the best gateway for new contributors to get familiar with the codebase, ship some quick code, and encourage them to continue contributing.
Write excellent issue descriptions
The next tip after labelling “good first issue” is to write high quality issue descriptions. New contributors have no context of the project / how the project is structured. Through “good first issue” issues, it’s your job as a repo maintainer to lower the barrier of entrance to making a contribution.
Write really clear and simple issue descriptions. Assume contributors have no context to your project. Describe the issue in great detail, but also provide a solution. If they’re totally new, give them step by step instructions on how to solve the problem. All they have to do is follow your instructions, and they will get their first contribution in.
Also, make sure to write a CONTRIBUTING.md. Creating a CONTRIBUTING.md file guides a first time contributor on how to set up a fork and create PRs.
Other tips
Here are a couple of other open source growth tips:
Create a Discord community. A lot of developers have Discord, and it’s the most effective way to communicate on the project.
Accept that growth in the beginning is slow. Popularity of your project will compound as more and more people slowly use it.
Respond and review PRs quick. Contributors love seeing their work get recognized very quickly.
If you’re considering building open source or actively working on one, I hope you found this article insightful!