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It is important to recognize that contributions can come in many forms. Contributions should not just be limited to code contributions. Think bigger. How can the project's or lab's documentation be improved? What sort of examples would be useful for people looking to contribute to the project or lab? What type of blog posts would help people who were interested in contributing to the project or lab? 

Examples of possible Contribute-a-thons

• Help a project localize their documentation into multiple languages by creating a translation pathway and reaching out to community members in regions around the world.
• Help a project or lab bring in more code contributors by creating a clear pathway for how someone can commit code and expand their role to ultimately become a maintainer.

Duration 

Option 1  : Projects can decide to do a fixed short duration event  such as 2 weeks ( to align with say a 1 sprint duration) focused event, where maintainers free up their time to be able to answer queries / review the pull requests and run the event with a lot of posts/ tweets/ daily updates etc. This model can have additional rewards for "max pull requests" 

Option 2  : Projects can decide to run it for over a long time , say 2 months, where anyone who contributes, gets an equivalent reward in accordance with the set rules. 

Phases 

At a high-level, a Contribute-a-thon would have a before, during and after phase.  We'll first define the specifics of what are the possible actionable's to be done in each of the different phases. And structure it with who/which team will have to work on those actions.

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