Boost your project's trust signals with great docs!

Everything Open Melbourne | 15 March 2023

Open source projects provide many cues that give us an idea of the health of the project and state of the community. These "trust signals" influence our decisions about using the product or joining the project. 

Some of the most powerful signals come from content, documentation, and language. In this presentation, Felicity talks about direct and indirect trust signals, and how you can influence them to increase the health of your open source project.

Resources

Kickstart your content and documentation using these inspirational resources and templates.

• The Good Docs Project templates
• GitHub: Building welcoming communities
• GitLab: Issue and merge request templates 
• Contributor Covenant 
• Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (CHAOSS)
• Symfony's Respectful review comments 
• TYPO3 Community Language & Writing Guide
• Writing the Readable README

Get a Trust and Vibrancy Report from OSP!

References

Dive deeper into trust, decision-making and signal theory. The presentation used ideas from these articles and publications: 

• Francis Frei’s TED Talk, How to build (and rebuild) trust 
• What Does It Mean To Make Values-Based Decisions? from Forbes.com
• Stephen Covey’s Trust Model from his bestselling book, The Speed of Trust
• Ten Ways to Build Better Communications with Trust by Tracy Evans 
• How to evaluate the sustainability of an open source project from opensource.com 
• Beyond Maintenance by Safia Abdalla from Increment, Issue 9, May 2019.
• Attracting active contributors to open source by Alyssa Rock
• How to Make Your Open Source Project Successful by Dmitri Pavlutin
• Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal
• The Signals that Potential Contributors Look for When Choosing Open-source Projects from the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI), Volume 3, Issue CSCW, November 2019

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