Community Bonding Blog

It really was real. I had gotten selected to one of the most competitive open-source programs for an organization that I was passionate to contribute to. That was just about the best thing that has happened to me and when I got to know about it, I couldn’t have been more motivated to delve deep on exploring the community and my project.

For context, I had been interacting with the community, and I had already been involved in various talks and posts beforehand. After I got selected and I took everything in, I thanked my mentors Chi Bong Ho and Herman Muhereza for their unwavering guidance to help me learn the ropes. I was informed about how to navigate this community bonding period and how I can start coding if I was ready to. I was invited to the GSoC orientation session exclusive to OpenMRS where the program administrators Jayasanka and Beryl formally welcomed me and my fellow contributors into the program and organization and one by one, we started introducing ourselves, where we were from, and one fun fact about ourselves (I said I loved dogs haha). It was attended by all the contributors, their mentors, program administrators and all the major contributors like Ian Bacher. Then Jayasanka walked us through his own experience when he was a part of this program, and he had specifically prepped a PPT to educate us about all the things he wished he knew when he had started. The responsibilities of the mentees, the mentors, our responsibility to the community and all the Do’s and Don’ts. This was incredibly helpful for someone who had just started open source and didn’t know the standard things we do so I really appreciated that part. After I got done with it I attended the general GSoC introductory meet that was hosted by Google for all the 1280 selected contributors. It was very informative and I loved seeing the sheer scale at which this program was being run as well.

In the coming days, I went through the documentation and best practices to interact with the community, and the most important way I can do this was joining the various platform calls that happened weekly in the community. I joined in the o3 platform call where Grace, Daniel and others talked about various topics, one of which was about the backend contributions that were not being acknowledged and how do we go about correcting that which was interesting to see how it was handled in a clear manner. In the end, I talked about my project and asked for everyone’s opinion on it. It went very well, and I appreciated all the input I had gotten. Then I carried on with researching more about my project in the coming days. As I had my exams for a week and half from 2nd June, exactly when GSoC coding period started, I was advised to start my coding from a week earlier and I was able to achieve significant progress owing to the pre-GSoC work and all the research I did during the coding period.

I was very happy to be included in such a warm and welcoming community and the community bonding period was a massive success. I couldn’t be more excited to start with the coding period and make this the best summer ever!