Developer Engagement - A Model
What does developer engagement look like?
- Have a GitHub account for your agency.
- Actively develop in public repositories.
- Respond to issues and pull requests in a timely fashion.
- Accept pull requests wherever possible.
- Offer a public-facing feedback mechanism for developers.
- Make a point to process and respond to front-facing feedback regularly so that other developers can see your engagement.
- Offer a source of developer updates.
- Offer a means by which developers can subscribe to updates.
- Reach out to existing users of the data for their input on future development.
- One neat way to find users you may not know about is to search the code on GitHub.com for the url of your agency’s API endpoint, like this or this.
- Host hackathons, datajams, and other developer-focused events.
- Generate content that tells the story of your agency’s data and points back to it.
- Respond to comments on your content.
- Ask the developer community what data they most want but don’t have and what improvements to existing data would be most useful to them. Then, follow through on that and report back that you have.
- Attend third-party developer events, such as local meetups and open government conferences.
- At other events, present on your data and ask for feedback, then make a targeted point to respond to it.
A Project of 18F
