Week 3 Shift: First edit

You make a real contribution to a real project, in the room, with people who can tell you what will happen to it

8 March 2027

The week the course stops being about reading.

Before the Shift#

Identify three candidate contributions from your norm map — things that are wrong, missing or broken, and that you can fix with evidence your project’s standard accepts. Small. A date, a dead link, a misclassified road, a typo in a docstring.

In the Shift#

Make the edit. Write the summary line before you save, not after, because the summary is what a reviewer reads first and most of them read nothing else.

Then write a prediction in your log: will this survive, and if it is reverted, by whom and on what grounds? Sealed predictions are marked in week 4 against what actually happened, and being wrong is worth more than being right if you can say why.

Ivy will take anyone on OSM through their first changeset; be warned that the bar for evidence there is higher than you think and “the council website says so” is not going to clear it.

Afterwards#

Watch it. Add the page to your watchlist, subscribe to the changeset, follow the pull request. Whatever happens next is week 4’s material.