On Fri, Oct 8, 2021 at 1:08 AM Chris Withers <chris@withers.org> wrote:

Don't get me wrong though: I think Hacktoberfest is a terrible idea in
that focusses on short-term fly-by contributing rather than fostering
the long term commitments that all open source projects desperately need.

I understand the frustration and indeed there needs to be a solution for engaging long-term contributors.

I think it's true that not everyone participating will end up as long term contributors, but this is a general problem, and we see the same issue with sprints at conferences as well. Perhaps only a small percentage of participants do end up being long term contributors.

I think it's unfair to say that sprints/hacktoberfest is bad because we don't end up with long term commitments. It's not our place to judge people's motivation into contributing to OS projects. Some people have never been exposed to OS before, maybe they just want to try it out and see if it's something they want to do long term. Events like sprints and hacktoberfest lets them experiment and to try contributing. It's ok if most end up not wanting to continue. So maybe hacktoberfest is bad for maintainers in general, as we get very little out of it, but it can be good to some others. I think we should not limit ourselves into saying "only serious/long term contributions are allowed here".

For the first time this year, there is finally some focus on open source maintainers during hacktoberfest. Participants are also encouraged to donate to participating projects. Since CPython project is already set up on GitHub Sponsors, I would like to get CPython listed there so that our project will appear on the list of projects that people can donate to, which will help with funding of CPython development.

I'm going to go ahead and add the hacktoberfest topic to the repo later today. I will also send an announcement to python-dev, letting people know of our participation, and that we will opt-out if we end up with mostly low quality and spam PRs. I will be watching the incoming PRs for the next week so I can determine whether we should opt-out or not.