Acknowledging all contributions/contributors

[spier]

GitHub has a way to show the people that committed (code) to this project. However by default only very few people are shown, and there is no further information about what they have contributed either.

As our community grows, it would be great to acknowledge the broad range of people that are supporting our patterns in all sorts of ways, not just the ones contributing code/patterns.

Implementation thoughts

I have heard good things about the all-contributors spec and bot but I don't know how it works in practice.

Their claim is:

Recognize All Contributors - Including those that don't push code

However their documentation looks like users need a GitHub handle to be added as contributors, which seems counter intuitive.

I am taking inspiration from The Turing Way project, who are using the tool for years. We could review their implementation notes. Some links to get started:

• https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/main/contributors.md#record-of-contributions
• https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#recognising-contributions
• https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/issues/274
• https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/issues/446

[CiaraFlanagan]

I've been meaning to bring this up!

I heard good things about this bot the other week but I have no direct knowledge myself ... The Turing Way project use it to celebrate their contributors.

[da5nsy]

Just flagging that since https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/pull/3093 there's been a slight change in how The Turing Way handles this. Read about it here: https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/community-handbook/infrastructure/infrastructure-contributors.html (if you just want to display the contributors on a readme page this level of complexity isn't necessary)

[spier]

Thank you for chiming in here @da5nsy, this is helpful context! I think that our first version of this might start with the most simple approach.

Putting two more questions here if I may. If you have any more experience with this, we would love to hear it.

1. Is it true that for the all-contributors spec/bot to work, the user that we want to acknowledge needs a GitHub handle?
2. For a long-lived project like ours, how to go about seeding the list of contributors with everybody that has already contributed in the past? Creating a PR for every single one seems like a really tough way to do this.

Thank you for sharing!

[da5nsy]

Is it true that for the all-contributors spec/bot to work, the user that we want to acknowledge needs a GitHub handle?

That's my understanding. Though I'm not certain.

Creating a PR for every single one seems like a really tough way to do this.

I think you have 2 options, either edit it manually to add lots of people (maybe add a couple with the bot first so you can just copy the formatting), or add multiple people in a single PR. There might be more automated ways, but I haven't come across them.

[spier]

Just noticed that we have had this idea in this repo before :) https://github.com/InnerSourceCommons/InnerSourcePatterns/issues/219