first-timers-only issues are those which are written in a very engaging, welcoming way, far different than the usual "just report the bug" type of GitHub issue. To read more about these, check out firsttimersonly.com, which really captures how and why this works and is beginning to be a movement in open source coding outreach! Beyond the extra welcome, this also includes getting such well-formatted issues out in front of lots of people who may be contributing to open source software for the very first time.

It takes a LOT of work to make a good issue of this type, and we often walk through each step required to actually make the requested changes -- the point is to help newcomers understand that a) they're welcome, and b) what the collaboration workflow looks like. Read more at https://publiclab.org/software-outreach !

Since early 2016, we at Public Lab are working to make our open source software projects more welcoming and inclusive and to grow our software contributor community in diversity and size. Creation of First-timers-only issues was also started at Public Lab near the end of 2016 - https://publiclab.org/notes/warren/10-31-2016/create-a-welcoming-first-timers-only-issue-to-invite-new-software-contributors

Now, as GSoC, Outreachy, and other outreach programs are seeking proposals for the upcoming summer, we put a lot of extra time and work into welcoming newcomers into our community and making sure they are well-supported. We've seen a huge increase in newcomers and wanted to report in about how this process has scaled!

Till now, nearly 409 FTO issues has been created across our projects which shows how many people have been welcomed in the Open Source 🌐 and in our community by the collaborative efforts of all of us.

From March 9, 2019, we started maintaining the list of people who want to work on various projects of Public Lab - https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/4963 through first-timers-only issues. And, we are proud to announce that in past 20 days, we all have created 55 FTO issues i.e., 13% of total Public Lab FTO issues(from beginning) are created in last 20 days. The growth is really tremendous and all this has been possible due to contribution of each community member.

The idea of maintaining the list of FTO issue-seekers is a big success. We have been able to assign issues to nearly 50 contributors in the past 20 days. And, each day the list is growing and we are opening more and more FTO issues for helping new contributors in taking their first-step in Open Source with Public Lab.

Those community members who have shown some tremendous support for creating FTO issues and they really ensured that there is a check mark next to the name of each newcomer: @cess @gauravano @warren @lekhidugtal @Harshithpabbati @divyabaid16 @IshaGupta18 @anan12 @sashadev-sky @madeofhuman @HarshK @Divy123 @Rishabh570 @gautami_gg

Thank you everyone for the great work and cheers to this awesome community growth 🎉 🥂 💯

(The main image is a screenshot taken from GitHub Visualizer. To see the whole visualization, visit the link

• http://ghv.artzub.com/#repo=plots2&climit=100&user=publiclab and pressing run)