polis VS Opensource-Contribution-Leaderboard

Most of the work of good public consultation facilitators is (1) stopping those loud/frustrated/opinionated/entrenched people from distorting process, and (2) allowing some people to be heard.

Perhaps surprisingly with (2), public consultations are sometimes almost like public therapy -- allowing people to feel heard so they can then take a step forward, even if it's not a step fully in the direction they prefer. People can make better compromises when they feel heard, they just need to be contained so they don't take speaking time/attention from everyone else.

Disclaimer: highly involved in public consultation, tech, and consensus-building technology through my interest in https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis

Why open source? If you ask me, other than the benefits mentioned above, open-source provides us with a platform where opportunities come to you in ways you have never imagined. For example, I got a 500-dollar freelance offer to integrate RocketChat into an application. I stayed the top contributor of RocketChat this season which increased my reach all over the community. I was also nominated by all my team members to add a milestone commit to the project we were working on. I connected with people from different fields of expertise. Most importantly, I enjoyed all of it.

I joined the #gsoc2021 channel within Rocket.Chat and started making smaller contributions to the Rocket.Chat main repository at first. Communicating with Rocketeers led me to start working on the GSoC contribution leaderboard repository in a team of four.