Author: Aishat Muibudeen
Engaging diverse contributions in open source projects and communities promotes Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Such engagement helps encourage broader recognition of other skill sets beyond coding, which remains the dominant contribution in most open-source communities. This study, which aims to contribute to a more inclusive open-source ecosystem, fostering greater participation from diverse contributors, investigates the percentage of non-code contributions in the top 10 trending GitHub repositories compared to technical contributions on September 18 and 24, 2024. The data reveals that non-code contributions accounted for a significantly lower percentage than technical contributions, with non-code representing only 9.5% in Fellow and 4.9% in Firecrawl, compared to 90.5% and 95.1% technical issues in those projects. The study also provides strategies for improving inclusivity in open-source software based on findings from the top 10 repositories. Conclusively, this study suggests many ways to bring about a more inclusive open-source ecosystem that helps to foster greater participation from diverse contributors.