How to create a shout out blog post

Giving a "shout-out" means to give recognition to a contributor of Hoodie’s community. Giving recognition is very important to us and we want to get better at it, but it also comes with several pitfalls that we have to keep in mind

• Every contribution counts. There is a human behind every contribution, and behind every human is a story. We do not judge if one contribution is worth more than another, it does not matter. It’s not about creating a competition of who contributes the most, but about creating a space where everyone is appreciated.
• While many of us are good at automating things, showing appreciation is not something we want to automate, ever. It is true that there is lots of room for improvement to help us find out who contributed something, but in the end, there should be a human being from the Hoodie community who uses the tools and decides how to phrase the shout-outs. We can write tools to make contributions more visible, but appreciation cannot be automated, otherwise it looses its value.

Read more about this and other topics on the Wecloming Communities blog post.

Current state

Here is an example shout-out blog post: http://hood.ie/blog/shoutouts-week-24.html

The current state of creating a shout-out blog post is pretty tedious. We have a tool that helps a little bit, but it still requires a lot of labors. Our goal is to eventually follow a regular schedule, but we don’t yet have a team in charge for that, and we probably need to improve the tools. Right now it takes me about 2h to create a shout out blog post

Kinds of contributions

• code
  • merged pull requests, extra shout-out to first time contributors, double shout-out to first-time Open Source contributors
• comments (bug reports, helpful comments)

Tools

We currently only have one tool that helps us, github-shoutouts, follow the instructions in the README to install it. Create a GitHub token, give it a description like "GitHub Shoutouts", you don’t need to give it any access. Once you create it copy the token somewhere safe, you will need it later.

Run the script like this

SHOUTOUT_GH_TOKEN=<your token here> github-shoutouts hoodiehq

It will ask you to set the starting date/time. Set it to the date when the last shout-out blog post was published.

When the script finished, it will create a file like shoutouts-2016-07-12.md in the current directory you run it in. This is your starting point

Step by Step

1. Open the shoutouts-*.md file created by github-shoutouts (see above)