What all big, successful projects like Django, Ruby on Rails, Node.js have in common? None of them has a single maintainer. They may have started as small, one person side projects, but what made them grow were outside contributions. There are a lot of great ideas in projects/repositories that where open sourced to share knowledge and help others. Unfortunately very often they get forgotten and abandoned. Not just by maintainers but also users who had issues with usage or were unable to fix something.

Having this same problem, I did a survey trying to find common issues:

I would ❤️ some input from OSS contributors about what makes a project/repo friendly for new contributors: https://t.co/S4kFp93Jvx

— Wojtek Siudzinski (@suda) March 14, 2016

I got a lot of interesting feedback with great initiatives like First Timers Only, Your First PR or Up For Grabs. It's amazing that there are so many great people improving our community! With all the data collected I decided to help a bit too and compile it into a small checklist for project maintainers and call it:

Contributions Welcome

Hopefully this will be useful for any project maintainer out there and I will do my best to keep my repos contribution friendly too!

Contributions Welcome welcomes contributions as well! Feel free to share your thoughts and comments on GitHub Issues page.