Blog Company Improving Open Development for Everyone
December 16, 2015
2 min read

Improving Open Development for Everyone

We want to give everyone that loves GitLab the opportunity to help shape its progress and be empowered to do this effortlessly.

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We want to make it super easy for anyone to contribute to GitLab.

That's why we've changed two things:

  1. Feature proposals are now handled in the GitLab projects on GitLab.com.
  2. We've assigned weights to relatively simple Accepting merge requests issues, to make it clear where new contributors can start.

Feature Proposals

In the past we've used Uservoice on feedback.gitlab.com to handle feature proposals and voting. This has served us well, but we always felt that we could bring the discussion even closer to the development of GitLab.

As we've introduced Award Emoji with GitLab 8.2 and are extending this to allow for sorting, filtering based on these, we feel now is the time to start migrating the feature proposals to GitLab.com.

This means that if you want to propose a feature for GitLab CE or EE, you can now simply create an issue in their respective projects`. This will allow anyone to vote, comment and discuss this.

This system is even more useful because anyone that has shown interest in the issue will be automatically updated with the status of the issue once someone starts working on it. In time this will also reveal areas where we might want to improve GitLab's issue tracker.

Accepting merge requests with weight

Updated Feb 6, 2017: up-for-grabs was changed to Accepting merge requests with weight

We started using issue weight for issues with Accepting merge requests label to make finding low-hanging fruits much easier. Now anyone can help make GitLab better for everyone.

We will assign weight smaller than five to issues that are not too hard or too big to work on. Whether you're a first-time contributor, someone that wants to improve their Ruby / Javascript / Go or someone that wants to contribute, but doesn't have time for a big bug fix or feature, these are issues that you should be able to work on. If you're already good at the languages GitLab uses, but you are new to the project, these issues are perfect for you as well.

Have a look at the Accepting merge requests issues for GitLab on GitLab.com right now. We will add more over time.

Please follow our the contribution guidelines to help you get started.

How can we make it easier?

We want to give everyone that loves GitLab the opportunity to help shape its progress and be empowered to do this effortlessly.

How can we make this easier for you? We'd love to hear it in the comments.

We want to hear from you

Enjoyed reading this blog post or have questions or feedback? Share your thoughts by creating a new topic in the GitLab community forum. Share your feedback

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