create an Issue list for "help needed"/"suggested contributions"

[tobyhodges]

tl;dr: Would a central Issue list of calls for help/contributions promote engagement from more Carpentries community members?

At the Instructor Development (formerly Mentoring) Committee meeting yesterday, Kari, Sarah, and I were discussing strategies for encouraging more people to get more involved in the Carpentries community. Currently, we have a webpage with a (long!) list of different things that people might want to get involved with but I think that something more specific and granular might be more effective.

Open source communities rely on a (well-maintained) list of Issues to help coordinate development/bug-fixing activity, and I wonder if we might have some success doing the same?

I have in mind a repository with an Issue list that operates something like a "help wanted" noticeboard for Carpentries-related activities. These Issues could be labelled to help people find topics/activities particularly relevant to them.

For example, I would be able to open an issue stating that I'd like help organising more themed discussion sessions, providing specific details of exactly what that would involve, and labelled with "community building", "beginner-friendly", or "good first contribution", and so on. Then, when people have some time to spare or are first getting to know the community and how the organisation operates (e.g. at end of instructor training), they can go there and maybe find something that they can help with. New issues could be summarised in the Carpentry Clippings each month. It might also help checking out trainees to find another way to fulfill their contribution requirement, depending on the "size" of the Issue described.

In my opinion, this would help to solve the problem where newcomers to the community either are not aware of ways in which they can help, worry about the long-term time commitment of becoming a member of a committee, or aren't sure of what would be involved. It should help to dispel the myth that there is some mysterious "inner circle" of community members that take care of everything and that they won't be welcome to contribute unless you've gone through some secret initiation ceremony and learned the secret handshake ;) (I'm exaggerating but this is pretty close to what I used to think...)

Thanks for reading 🙂 I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

[jduckles]

@tobyhodges Everything old is new again! I do love that this has come up, and I think we have a lot of the tooling mostly in place and it will be easily adapted. We could clearly use some more careful attention to particular labels and how we present those to people. We have had a "development dashboard" on the Software Carpentry website (kinda buried yes, but it does exist and is regularly updated). It is built from a YAML file made from data slurped from GitHub api using this python script.

I think creating an interface that guides interested community members to issues/pull requests and conversations they might care about might help this be more useful.

It is dizzying how many GitHub repos [over 500, not including LC at last count] and orgs [swcarpentry, datacarpentry, carpentries, data-lessons, librarycarpentry] there are now to wade through to find where you might contribute. I whole-heartedly support your proposed effort, I think it will take some careful and thoughtful consideration to make it not overwhelming, but I think we can get there based on trying to understand what kinds of lessons/issues/repos people would like to contribute to, watch and be aware of.

[tobyhodges]

Thanks for the response, @jduckles. I must confess that I had no idea that the development dashboard exists! I agree that, whatever we choose to do to try to increase engagement, it needs to be carefully thought-through and managed. Otherwise, we could end up actually making things more confusing/inaccessible, which would be the opposite of what I want to achieve.

If I were a newcomer to the community and/or looking for a way to get more involved in the Carpentries, I think that I would find the dashboard quite overwhelming. I think that your idea of a dashboard that would filter the long list of open issues etc would be really helpful. If people are making use of the 'help wanted" issue label in our repos, it should be possible to pull these out and highlight them via the API. Even better if we can show them to the user based on what aspect they're looking to contribute to - lesson maintenance, community building/instructor development, curriculum, and so on.

[kariljordan]

Hi @tobyhodges, pinging you about this issue. Where do we go from here?

[kariljordan]

@arinbasu @sstevens2 @maglet I wanted to circle back to this issue. It's almost been a year!

[tobyhodges]

I still think this could be very helpful. Target audience would be:

• checking out trainees looking for a good place to contribute, and
• those who want to get involved with lesson contributions but aren't sure where to start

Anyone tagged in this conversation have experience working with the GitHub API?

[tobyhodges]

Ok, from her post on Twitter I have been made aware of https://github.com/yochannah/first-ticket-finder from the wonderful @yochannah. See http://intermine.org/contributing/tickets-to-try/ for an example of it in action. This is pretty much exactly what I had in mind and what I want for The Carpentries 🎉

I will pitch this at the next IDC meeting.

[jduckles]

The Python script linked upthread has a good example of pulling these out of the GitHub API. Replacing the list of CONTROLS in that script with the data in the lesson feed would probably make a very good start.