Open Source contributions in the age of AI agents | PyCon US open space recap

This past week I attended PyCon US for the first time. During it, Shiva Gaire hosted an open space called “Open Source contributions in the age of AI agents.” The description was

• Getting started with oss contribution
• How to volunteer a project for longer term?
• How to be consistent and win trust?
• How to avoid burnouts?

The topic is something I’m interested in and something I’ve seen impact the Django community, so I wanted to see what others had to say. Being an open space, the actual conversation is dictated by who shows up and where the conversation moves.

I was pleased to see many people there who wanted to contribute to open source. I believe it was only myself and another person who were maintaining packages in the room. The other 8-10 people were either irregular or prospective contributors.

We discussed ways for people to contribute to projects and what to look for in them. My notes in this area were lacking. Though I particularly enjoyed someone’s idea of creating office hours for community members to review PRs. One of my contributions to the conversation was mentioning PostgreSQL’s commitfest concept.

One thing I was curious about in the room was why everyone was there. Specifically, why did everyone want to contribute, especially in the age of AI? Here are the notes I had taken:

• A person wanted to be an OSS contributor, wanted to learn to be persistent, but felt there was a barrier to OSS.
• A person wanted to sustain the community via contributions
• One wanted to understand how the developer world is changing
  • There was additional consideration about understanding the imbalance between open/close source
• Another wanted to keep skills sharp in other areas, avoiding becoming domain specific
• One wanted to understand how open source works and understand how AI changes it
  • It was mentioned they wanted to differentiate how PRs work.
• A person wanted to find new problems to solve outside paid work.
• Another wanted to keep people involved and sustain the community.
  • Someone acknowledged it has helped open many people to contribute to even more languages and frameworks.

What I thought was intriguing was that a lot of those responses didn’t even allude to AI. Or perhaps that’s not surprising, if you see AI as just another tool, you don’t frame your motivations around it.

During our conversation, I shared some of my thoughts on how to get involved contributing to open source. I let them know they should expect to need to be persistent in their efforts to join a community, they should come off mute and engage with the community, and I made it clear they all have something to offer existing open-source communities.

I wanted to share some resources I created, but there wasn’t a way to do that easily in the discussion. Here are the resources I would expect to be helpful to people looking to contribute, swapping out Django for another community.

• Contributing to the Django community
• Connecting with Django contributors on Mastodon

This open space was one of the highlights of my first PyCon US. Thank you to Shiva for hosting it and to everyone who participated!

If you have thoughts, comments, or questions, please let me know. You can set up a meeting with me, or find me on the Fediverse, Django Discord server or use email.