I’m a Systems Engineering student, and most of my week is spent in front of data. The other half of me has always been outdoors: walking trails, turning over leaf litter looking for snakes, waiting forty minutes for a bird to land somewhere the light works. This project is where those two halves finally meet.

WPCredits asked us to pick an area of contribution to the WordPress ecosystem. I looked at several — translation, documentation, support — and ended up at the Photo Directory, the image library WordPress maintains so anyone can use photos for free. What drew me to it is that the contribution is visible and measurable. You either published the photos or you didn’t.

There was also a less technical reason. Costa Rica shows up on every biodiversity list in the world, but when you search for free images of our species, there’s very little, and it’s usually the same four or five animals. A resplendent quetzal, a red-eyed tree frog, maybe a sloth. Meanwhile there are hundreds of species that a student, a teacher, or a small NGO anywhere in the world simply cannot find a usable photo of.

So that’s the gap I want to work on. My goal is to publish at least 30 original photographs under a CC0 license, covering three regions with very different climates: the Caribbean lowlands, the Pacific side, and the highlands around Dota, Cerro de la Muerte and Irazú. Costa Rica isn’t one landscape — it’s several stacked on top of each other, and I want the collection to reflect that.

What I expect to learn is the full lifecycle of an open source contribution: how it’s submitted, who reviews it, what gets rejected and why. I’ve used open source my entire career without ever contributing to it, which is a slightly uncomfortable thing to admit.

The next posts will document every step, including the parts that go wrong. I’m fairly sure there will be plenty of those.