Intro:
Open-source software is a perfect example of the power of collective effort. However, with collective effort comes a few problems that people may face, the biggest of which is very often the “How”. “How” to contribute is something that a lot of people are unsure of, and on closer introspection, you can rephrase that problem to a “What”. “What contributions can people make?” There’s an even deeper level to this, and that often is: “What contributions matter?”. Part of why it took me so long to make my very first contribution to open-source was that I felt I didn’t have much I could realistically offer any organization as a beginner. I spent so much time reading other people’s contributions, getting intimidated, because I felt only the huge Pull Requests were the worthwhile ones. Wagtail helped me correct that view. Every contribution matters, and the impact bubbles upward. At the time of my first contribution, I had only written Django code for 2 months (and Python for 3 months). I want to share how enriching the experience has been, watching a randomly picked “good first issue” turn into a series of more advanced contributions, which led to my becoming a Google Summer of Code Contributor for 2 consecutive years (2024 & 2025).
People want to make contributions that matter, and might only want to contribute things they feel have impact (or weight). This comes from a place of personal experience, and shared experiences with people. The truth could not be farther from this, and this presentation aims to show you how something as “seemingly” little as a doc fix can have a huge impact on users.

Structure:
The structure of the presentation would look very closely to this:
1. Types of contributions people could make. With an emphasis on the often ignored ones like “reviews”, “triages”, “translations”, or even to dependencies etc.
2. A spotlight on how certain “seemingly small” contributions have morphed into essential parts of Wagtail.
3. The progression of Wagtail, with an emphasis on how external contributions have shaped things.
4. A brief moment to share my contribution experience from the 2024 GSoC program: on how a prototype for the image block I shared solely for an illustration became the preferred pattern of choice, and eventually led to an RFC that was created (and backed by the core team members) for a rework of the existing image upload/selection flow. Hint: It all started with me playing around with the browser DOM on the Wagtail admin.
5. A call to action on contributing.

How I will approach:
The presentation will be a mix of statistical data, and references from actual Wagtail community data, e.g Pull requests, issues, discussions, triages, outreach programs, translations, security reports, sub-teams. The idea would be to show, not only speak. And the general idea would be to narrow “big” chunks of contributions into their smallest denominator, painting the progression of small to big. The crux would be drawing personal experiences from what I’ve seen and done so far in my time as a Wagtail contributor. An important mention would be about how the Stimulus package, which has come to be an integral part of Wagtail, came to be of so much use to the CMS.

What attendees will learn:
Some of the things attendees can expect to learn are:
1. The importance of contributions of all forms, shapes, and sizes.
2. An idea of just how much community work goes on in Wagtail.
3. Some new ways they could contribute that they may not have previously known.
4. Some other parts of Wagtail, e.g dependencies.