Developer experience is an interesting relatively new concept, sometimes explained as the complement to the older concept of user experience.
But the term developer is often reserved to programmers, or at least to software developers. Contributor experience is a generalization of developer experience, focusing on the productivity and satisfaction of all contributors to a project, regardless of whether they are considered developers or not. Contributor experience is particularly relevant in CBPP, which is not restricted to software production.
Contributor experience therefore goes well beyond programming tools, covering important foundations like communication infrastructure and governance, which ensure that projects not only satisfy existing contributors, but recruit and train new ones to ensure their durability. The best description of and advice about contributor experience comes from the Contributor Experience Project, whose homepage describes it as a “new open source community-led project dedicated to developing best practices for onboarding and supporting contributors to open source projects”.
Unfortunately, its handbook, while very interesting, leaves much room for improvement. And more problematically, inspection reveals that the Contributor Experience Project was in fact “sunset” in June 2025.
A project dedicated to contributor experience being unable to communicate its own status, after suffering the same sad fate as so many fragile CBPP projects which neglect recruitment or other invisible work, is an ironic testament to the importance of prioritizing contributor experience. If you know of other projects to define and advise on contributor experience, please comment.