  Context: To attract, onboard, and retain any new-comer in Open Source
Software (OSS) projects is vital to their livelihood. Recent studies conclude
that OSS projects risk failure due to abandonment and poor participation of
newcomers. Evidence suggests more new users are joining GitHub, however, the
extent to which they contribute to OSS projects is unknown. Objective: In this
study, we coin the term 'newcomer candidate' to describe new users to the
GitHub platform. Our objective is to track and characterize their initial
contributions. As a preliminary survey, we collected 208 newcomer candidate
contributions in GitHub. Using this dataset, we then plan to track their
contributions to reveal insights. Method: We will use a mixed-methods approach,
i.e., quantitative and qualitative, to identify whether or not newcomer
candidates practice social coding, the kinds of their contributions, projects
they target, and the proportion that they eventually onboard to an OSS project.
Limitation: The key limitation is that our newcomer candidates are restricted
to those that were collected from our preliminary survey.
