Openness & Transparency at Gospeak
Gospeak is a side project I started a year ago to help meetup organizers in their daily tasks and make better events (as I’m myself a HumanTalks Paris organizer).
It has grown a lot since then and some people joined. We launched and the scope and ambitions had grown a lot (but this is for another article).
Gospeak is an open source project, so its source code is publicly available, obviously ^^. But this is not only about the code. We fully embraced this concept of openness and want to build this project collaboratively with a community and share knowledge with everyone.
So, what we did: having the code publicly accessible is the first stone but this is only a prerequisite, not an end. A key part in having people invested is to make contributing enjoyable.
This starts with a beginner friendly codebase (project beginner, not coding beginner): well structured (hey DDD my friend ^^) and consistent. This is an important topic for me and I have done my best in Gospeak, even if I see some area of improvement and would happily discuss about any suggestion in this regard.
It also goes with a great getting started documentation, explaining key concepts of the app, the architecture and the tech stack so people can easily locate where things things are to evolve them. This one is still a work in progress in Gospeak but I hope we can release it soon.
But good and enjoyable code, is like public code, just a prerequisite. For me, the most important part is having enjoyable and valuable moments with people. Where everybody can learn, share, experiment and have fun with others. For that, we started some mob programming sessions and they had a huge success. Not in term of attendance (I limited to 10 and we were around 5 each time) but in term of quality time. I had amazing feedbacks from participants and enjoyed them a lot myself also.
For the future we will try to expand them to remote (as it was asked), it will be an interesting experience I you are interested, you can join our group and if you have some experience with remote mob programming in Scala, I will be more than happy to hear some advices or tips to make them cool.
These sessions are really great for onboarding new contributors, they don’t feel the pain to start in a huge codebase they don’t understand. They are also great for people to learn by experiencing different ways of doing things. But if we want people to stay more than a few sessions, we have to build a clear understanding of our goal, share it openly and make people embracing it. This part has yet to be built and this will be one of our top objective for 2020. We aim for a radical transparency model, where we share our thoughts, experiments and results. Having a lot more direct communication with the community, developers but also event organizers, speakers and companies wanting to build an open ecosystem. Our dream would be to build an inclusive community of people around the public speaking and help as many as we could to get into it.
If you feel connected to that, please reach us so we can discuss how to join forces and how Gospeak could help you with your objectives.
Any idea you want to share with us? Drop us a message!
Contact: contact@gospeak.io or @gospeak_io