NumPy is the universal standard for working with numerical data in Python and is at the core of the scientific Python and PyData ecosystems. It provides ndarray, a homogeneous n-dimensional array object with methods to efficiently operate on it.

Authors: Mukulika Pahari (@Mukulikaa), Mars Lee (@marsbarlee)

It can be difficult for contributors to know that there are many different ways to contribute to NumPy. Especially for first-time contributors, there is uncertainty about how to become a regular contributor, a reviewer, or a maintainer. Additionally, contributors may not be aware of non-code contributions like documentation fixes, triaging issues, and reviewing pull requests, among others. With the NumPy Contributor Journey Comics, we aimed to disseminate knowledge of these various contribution pathways to help lower the barrier to entry and encourage more users to participate in the community. Although we have yet to collect formal reviews on the effectiveness of these comics, conversations with new contributors in the community and other open source project maintainers have indicated that this is a welcome addition to the documentation. This particular experiment with a different medium has turned out to be successful and we encourage other communities to also explore different media depending on their audience and information needs.

It can be difficult for contributors to navigate a vast opensource project like NumPy. There are multiple pathways of contribution and all of them equally valuable. Our aim through the NumPy comics was to introduce one such pathway in a way approachable to contributors new to opensource and NumPy alike. The complete proposal can be found at Google Season of Docs 2024: Project Proposal.

With the support of the Google Season of Docs 2023, the “How to Contribute to NumPy” comics were created and well received, both within the NumPy community and beyond. As seen in the GSoD-NumPy 2023 case study, a hundred physical copies of the comics were handed out at a talk at PyData NYC 2023 by the technical writer, Mars. The technical writer along with the community decided to continue with its development and complete the final pages of this comic this season. She came up with the final goals and deliverables for this project.

How much money did you ask for?	$3800
How did you come up with this estimate?	$50/hr for an estimated 76 hours of work
How many hours of work did you budget for the project?	76 hours
How many hours of work were actually needed for the project?	Around 76 hours
What other expenses did you include in your budget?	None
Did you run into any budget surprises during the project (e.g. misestimates)? If so, please explain.	We had to enter into a contract with NumFOCUS, the fiscal sponsor of NumPy, for the release of the Open Collective funds and they charged us a 10% fee.

We re-hired Mars this year as she was the technical writer and project planner last year on this project. Mars has also been part of the NumPy community since 2021.

The timeline was consistent with the original plan. The timeline we followed:

May - September 2024: Finished illustrating 6 comic pages and back cover October 2024: Conducted community review October - November 2024: Final revision and PR submitted

Deliverable	% Complete	Relevant Links
Completed contributor journey comics	100%	https://github.com/numpy/numpy.org/pull/795

Mars promoted the comics at various scientific Python meetings and brought a lot of visibility to the project.

The metrics we set were:

• Increase in first-time attendees to the NumPy community meetings
• Increase in first-time contributors becoming repeating contributors
• Increase in the number of responses to issues by non-maintainers
• Increase in the number of reviews made by non-maintainers
• Increase in the number of people given repository rights

We plan to monitor these metrics over the coming months through community engagement on Github and developer meetings and sprints. We will also add specific questions to the annual NumPy survey for better insights.

We picked up the project from where we left off at the end of the Season of Docs 2023. The technical writer had well-set goals and incorporated the lessons in budgeting we learnt from the last project. Due to good momentum, the project was relatively smooth sailing this year and was completed on time. The technical writer presented the completed comics at various conventions and sparked interesting discussions on novel methods of improving documentation. This project seemed to encourage other opensource communities to explore these methods for their own interactions with newcomers and beginner contributors. The initial anecdotal reviews indicate a successful project and we are positive the metrics we will collect over the next while will reflect this.