Just to show my appreciation: +1, looks very cool! Any idea of when we can start filling it up with real things? Thanks.
Regards. On 07/02/2016 17:01, Daniel Gruno wrote:
Hi ComDev folks! Ramblings incoming :) As an aside to the 'Guiding volunteers' thread, I was talking with Rich (Bowen) while he was at DevConf this weekend, and we got to thinking whether it was possible to make a tiny tool that would solve one specific issue we often come across when someone says "I know X, Y and Z - What can I do to help Apache?". Traditionally, we've said "subscribe to our mailing list (which one?!)" or "Go look at JIRA/BugZilla", which in itself is fine, but off-putting to many people as we don't actively use neither MLs or bug trackers to advertise what we want done, and what tech/person skills would be helpful where (we're terrible!). Furthermore, it is our opinion/assessment that bug trackers are not that great from a "skills -> tasks" perspective. While great for bugs and larger tasks for an existing audience, they don't provide the right overview or search features that one could want, and keeping some sort of uniform setup for these tasks across the ASF is going to be a LOT of work. ...If only we had somewhere someone could just go and say "I'm great at marketing and documentation, what tasks are there that I can do?" and then get 10 different requests across 6 projects, some that you could start on right away and some that require more intimate knowledge with the project. ...Or the experienced C/Python programmer that wants to know which tasks at Apache they could hack on as a good introduction to that project, while at the same time helping the project accomplish something new. ...Oh, and wouldn't it be nifty if we could have a widget we could place on our web site that lists what we as a project or foundation are looking for right now in terms of work to be done, so when people visit our page, they can see that "hey, we're looking for a web dev guru - is that you?" ? Enter 'Help Wanted!'. It's a very small (and very much work-in-progress) tool that you can use to browse the tasks that all the Apache projects would like to get done, see the difficulty of it, language (whether spoken/written or programming) skills needed, what it's about and who/how to contact. You can also use the HW widget to plug your own project's requests into your web site, or you can display all the current tasks waiting in the system across the ASF. 350+ initiatives, 170+ TLPs, one uniform hub for requests that can help people get started with Apache. The code is "live" at: https://helpwanted.apache.org/ A test widget is here: https://helpwanted.apache.org/wtest.html (the test widget shows what it could look like on the httpd site) It's open for all committers to go set up new tasks (universal commit bit, so to speak, just click on 'edit tasks'), and we hope it will be a hub for putting people on the right path - whether that be a pointer to JIRA, ML etc - to contributing to our projects. Or it'll crash and burn and we'll never speak of it again :) Contributions, feedback, quality control etc are MOST WELCOME, and we're only getting started with the proof-of-concept right now (as found in svn). Hopefully we'll have something stable and polished by the end of February? :) With regards, Daniel. PS: Yes, I know the admin area is a stylistic nightmare. That'll be fixed...eventually! And the task guide needs a LOT of work. Saying "contact the dev list" isn't enough, but I'll need a word smith for that :)
-- Francesco Chicchiriccò Tirasa - Open Source Excellence http://www.tirasa.net/ Involved at The Apache Software Foundation: member, Syncope PMC chair, Cocoon PMC, Olingo PMC, CXF committer http://home.apache.org/~ilgrosso/
