Our Lovely Contributors¶

This is just a quick high-level overview of the different types of contributors we can expect to work on Plasma Group projects! All of our contributors should be treated with respect, and they’re all equally important. It’s important to understand the different types of people who might be helping out with Plasma Group projects so we can streamline the contributing experience (and make sure everyone feels the love they deserve!).

New Contributors¶

New Contributors are people who want to get involved with PG but might not know how yet. This is the “bucket” category for the remaining personas and New Contributors are eventually funnelled into one of the other categories. These users can be pretty much anyone - software engineers, crypto enthusiasts, family members, whoever.

Generally, we want to help new contributors become active contributors. For example, we might want to direct someone to resources that help them become a Beta Testing Contributor. This means that we should develop a set of strong resources where a new contributor can land and figure out where they want to help out.

Co-Developing Contributors¶

Co-Developing Contributors are people working on the PG code in any one of our repositories. These people are doing all sorts of work, like tackling issues, adding new features, or writing new documentation. This work is usually happening in the Plasma Group repositories.

These contributors want things to work on, and want a good experience while doing so. You wouldn’t be working on a project if you couldn’t figure out what to do or if you got a terrible response every time you tried to contribute!

Co-Developers are extremely important and we need to make sure that they’re always treated with respect. We should be responding as quickly as possible, reviewing their PRs, and rewarding them for their hard work.

Beta Testing Contributors¶

Beta Testing Contributors are users helping us test our code, but not necessarily writing code. Often these contributors don’t have the time to contribute lots of code because they’re busy with other projects. However, these users still want to give back to the community by seeing how things work and playing with new features. These users want to make sure that their feedback is heard and that their time spent beta testing isn’t for nothing. Adding features or fixing bugs quickly will make beta testers feel like there’s constantly something new to explore.

Beta Testing Contributors should be treated as a great resource, because they are. Without them, we wouldn’t find all of the various bugs we’re inevitably going to have. There’s no such thing as production-quality software without beta testing :-).

Passive Contributors¶

Passive Contributors are users who are interacting with PG but aren’t actively working on issues in one of our GitHub repositories. These users are typically people building applications on top of our projects but not working on the underlying code. For example, this might be someone building a wallet using @pigi/plasma-js.

Most of the time, these users don’t come in intending to make significant changes to the code that they’re making use of - they usually just expect it to work. When they do interact with the codebase, it tends to be to report a bug or ask for a new feature. These users are important because they find bugs in production and request features that help us build things out for real use-cases.

External Contributors¶

There are lots of people who support us but aren’t specifically helping out by making issues, tackling issues, or requesting features. This could be people on twitter discussing our work, sitting near us when we’re working, or just providing moral support. We have to care for these people because they’re what keep us motivated and pushing to build the best projects we can! Let them know they’re appreciated because we wouldn’t be here without them.