Event 3 topics proposal

[kelset]

Hello everyone!

We are still finalising the details for our third event (subscribe to #10 to stay in the loop), and while we are still discussing the format of the discussion based on your feedback #11, we wanted to start creating this issue about choosing the topics of conversation for the next event.

If you have an open source related topic that you'd love to discuss about with the other participants, please write it below!

Format:

## TOPIC

And a one line description to clarify what you mean

And if you scroll through and see a topic you like, give it a 👍 so that we can quickly understand which ones are more relevant.

[benjie]

Choosing a license

There's a lot of open source licenses, both copyleft and permissive. When starting or open-sourcing a project, how do you decide which license to choose? Do you use different licenses for different projects?

[benjie]

Contributor license agreements

Do you use a CLA on your projects? Why? Why not? GitHub's terms state that contributions are made under the same license the project is available under; under what circumstances is this not enough? Do you use a custom or standard CLA? How do you enforce it?

[benjie]

Dual-licensing

Dual licensing is when a project is released under a (typically copyleft) open source license, and also made available under a proprietary license for users (typically companies) who do not want their codebase available under the open source license. It's one of the commonly accepted ways of funding open source software. Do you dual-license? Why? How is it working out? How much do you charge? Have you heard any interesting/horror stories?

[benjie]

(:point_up: Can you see a theme? I'd expect only one of these to actually be picked (if any), I'm interested to see which particular take on the topic people are most interested in.)

[benjie]

Communication channels

There's lots of ways of communicating with a project and it's maintainers: issues, PRs, chat, mailing lists, forums, StackOverflow, email, twitter DMs, f2f. How do you decide which channels to use? How do you promote them? How do you dissuade people from using your non-preferred channels (e.g. pestering you over email or DMs)? What channels/services have worked well for your project?

[benjie]

Issue tracking strategies

How do you keep your issues manageable? Do you try and close as many as you can? Do you leave them open and deal with the ones that receive the most interest? If you work on multiple projects, how do you prioritise the issues to deal with? Do you use interfaces such as https://github.com/issues / https://github.com/pulls to view issues/PRs across multiple projects?

[benjie]

PR review etiquette

When do you leave feedback and wait on the author, vs when do you make the changes yourself? Do you make changes and push back to the PR, or do you merge and make the changes after? Which words/phrases do you use, and which do you avoid, in order to encourage contributors? What are the best practices around performing pull request reviews?

[benjie]

Maintaining documentation

Managing documentation for an open source project is a diverse subject. Some projects have big complex websites, some have just a README. Some have autogenerated docs from the API, some have hand-written docs, some a hybrid approach. Sometimes the docs are kept in the repo, sometimes in a separate repo. What works for you? What do you avoid? How do you encourage people to contribute to the docs?