Karine Valença shares her journey of contributing to the Grafana open-source project, highlighting the supportive and organized nature of its community. After being encouraged by her company to engage in open-source initiatives, she explored Grafana due to its relevance in her daily work and was impressed by the repository's structure and the maintainers' active engagement with contributors. Utilizing labels such as "effort/small" and "beginner friendly," she successfully made her first contributions during Hacktoberfest, documenting react components and adding a new index to the database migration tables. Valença emphasizes the welcoming environment of the Grafana community, which encourages new contributors by providing clear guidance and constructive feedback throughout the contribution process.