REQUEST: Improve new contributor guide

[zacharyrgonzales]

Affected Repository

https://github.com/open-telemetry/community

Requested changes

• I want to make the new contributor guide easier to find

  • Move contributor guide link to towards the top of the README.md
  • Add prominent "Start Contributing" button in docs navigation

• Add instructions to find pick an open issue with the "good first issue" label

  • Include direct links to "good first issue" label searches
  • Add step-by-step tutorial for finding beginner-friendly issues
  • Include screenshots of GitHub issue filters

• Add a table with all the repositories and what they mean

  • core: Central OpenTelemetry APIs and SDK implementations
  • Instrumentation: Auto-instrumentation libraries for various languages/frameworks
  • Collector: Data collection agent for receiving, processing and exporting telemetry
  • Operator: Kubernetes operator for managing OpenTelemetry components
  • Specifications: OpenTelemetry technical specifications and protocols
  • Documentation: Central documentation repository and website

Purpose

To improve the new contributor experience by making it easier to find contribution opportunities and understand the OpenTelemetry project structure. This will help reduce barriers to entry and increase the number of active contributors.

Expected Duration

2-3 weeks. This includes time for implementing changes, getting community feedback, and iterating on the documentation structure.

Repository Maintainers

@svrnm

[svrnm]

Hey @zacharyrgonzales, thanks for your feedback yesterday and for raising this issue!

Move contributor guide link to towards the top of the README.md

That's a good idea. The "Get Involved" section at the top of the Readme could profit from that link

Add prominent "Start Contributing" button in docs navigation

That's a separate discussion for an issue over at https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io

Add instructions to find pick an open issue with the "good first issue" label

There are some details to that in processes.md but they indeed need some more details. Adding links and a tutorial would be helpful!

Add a table with all the repositories and what they mean

I also think that will be helpful. We need to keep in mind that some repositories are not within that scope or for different purposes (e.g. the .github repository), but we still can list them. If we create such a list we also need to consider that new repositories have to be added there (that needs to be added to this guide

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@zacharyrgonzales if you'd like to help with that I recommend to go through that list one by one. So you tackle one item, we work on the PR and then we address the next one. wdyt?

[zacharyrgonzales]

@svrnm That sounds like a great plan! Lets do it.