You’ve added context to an issue, contributed to a code review, and maybe even submitted your own pull request. Now, you want to dive deeper into the community around the project.

Get Involved in the Community

You’ll find regular contributors to the project in the comments section of issues and pull requests.
You can also click on Insights in the repository’s navigation bar, then on Contributors to discover other active community members. Visit their GitHub profiles—sometimes they indicate how to get in touch.

You can also follow organizations or companies on GitHub to stay informed. Your personal dashboard displays the public activity of each company, user, or organization you follow.

You may also meet people with similar interests by attending meetups or conferences on open source-related topics. If the project or its ecosystem is large enough, you might meet people involved in it. Look for archives containing recordings of past conferences, podcasts, newsletters, or mailing lists.

Some projects have centralized communication, often mentioned on the project’s website or in the README file. This could be a Discord server, a Slack community, Gitter, an IRC channel, or even regular office hours.

Code Reuse

Code—and solutions—can sometimes be reused in other projects.
Have you solved a very specific problem in a project? It’s likely that other projects could benefit from it too. You can:

• Publish it as a standalone library (dependency).
• Duplicate the project with your added feature.
• Create a GitHub Action that others can integrate into their workflow.

The first option is probably best if your piece of code works as a reusable plugin across multiple web projects.
Duplicating or forking a project with your addition is useful if you’re addressing a very specific use case for a small group of users—or even just one.
Keep in mind that you’ll need to keep your fork up to date with the original repository if you want to benefit from things like security patches.

GitHub Actions are packaged scripts that automate tasks in a GitHub development workflow. There are two types: container actions and JavaScript actions. You can submit your action to the GitHub Marketplace to make it visible.

GitHub Marketplace connects you with developers looking to improve their GitHub workflows. Use this platform to publish actions and share apps with other users for free.

In Any Case, You Become a Maintainer

Whichever path you choose, you now become a maintainer of a project.
People will come to you with praise, questions, and complaints. Are you ready to take on that responsibility?

If your project grows, applications might depend on your piece of code. Can you involve others to help lighten the load?
Do you have time to add documentation, triage issues, and review suggestions from people you don’t know?
Think about your available bandwidth, and instead set clear expectations in your project’s README file.

Alternatively, you can publish your code in a public gist or a blog post. After all, code doesn’t have to be on GitHub to be open source.