Adventures in Engineering

Open Source Crowdsourcing

Last night I had one of my random project ideas: lets survey PHP user groups across the world and see if there’s any pattern of having a Code of Conduct (and if so, which one).

Whilst not a definitive list, http://php.ug is a great starting place with 242 listed user groups – enough to make a splash I’d say!

Now manually viewing (translating if required) and tracking down a code of conduct for 242 user groups is no mean feat so I put out a tweet asking if anyone had some time to spare.

Absolutely blown away within minutes I had lots of offers to help view, categorise and flag Code of Conducts for these user groups. Quietly hoping everyone might contribute 5 or so user groups and their coffee I went to bed having reviewed roughly 20% of the groups already.

This morning I woke up to a 96% completed list, leaving only those with private Facebook groups to review. Wow!!!

Whilst I’ll publish the results in due course, I wanted to briefly thank everyone who responded to help out! I think it’s an amazing example of how the open source community is filled with generous, willing people who proactively offered to help (I didn’t approach a single person individually).

My initial tweet was somewhat vague in what I was looking for help doing and yet these people bravely reached out (either on twitter or via the many slack teams I’m a member of) to offer help. To Fiona Tweedie,Clinton RoyFabian Blechschmidt@jdotpJeremy HainsfordBen MarksDrew WestcottAdriana Belotti,Daniel Craig JallitsDrew Broadley, Frederick Vanbrabrant, and Nigel Greenway I want to say a very very huge thank you to being generous (and brave) with your time in helping look through all this data!

developerjack