I am unsure if this is the correct list to talk about this, but considering the description it's what made most sense.
Recently on #gnu (freenode) someone joined the channel looking for guidance. They were saying that they wanted to start contributing to a Free Software project, but they were having difficulty thinking of where to start. Of course, they were given the GNU Savannah 'Help Wanted' page, and told that they should find a software that they currently use that they would like to contribute to. This kind of question arises every now and then on #fsf (freenode) as well, and even other channels. Someone is eager to help the community and contribute to a free software project, but does not know where to begin. And it's easy for us to say "find something you already use and contribute to it", however this is not as easy as we make it out to be. To begin with most people (as we know) run a large variety of software on their computers, many of which are complex and have a very large code base. What's more, we must all be familiar (through convincing our peers to use Free Software) that too many options is just as scary as too few. And even when they do try to find a project to get involved in the questions arise of "do I have the skills?", "where exactly do they need help?", "I don't have the time to contribute a lot, can I be a casual contributor?", etc. Yes, these are things that they could really just ask the maintainers of the project and the maintainer would be more than happy to show them the way, however for someone who is new to contributing to Free Software projects this isn't as obvious. Something that I really liked when considering GNU Savannah for hosting one of my projects was that it had a 'Help Wanted' page (which I mentioned above). To me that is a great feature that allows new contributors to find a project that is looking for help, and it even answers a lot of the questions that I mentioned above that go through the newcomer's mind ("do I have the skills?", mostly). However, GNU Savannah has two flaws in this regard: 1. It's only for projects hosted on GNU Savannah, other projects hosted elsewhere should also be able to ask for contributors, 2. A lot of the information on GNU Savannah's 'Help Wanted' page is outdated. Therefore I would suggest creating a site (it would be nice if it were linked to by the FSF) where any Free Software project can post a notice asking for help (similar to what GNU Savannah has) and visitors can respond. However, unlike GNU Savannah there should be two improvements (at least): 1. To avoid a bunch of outdated information these posts should be renewed every so often (making it easy, like responding to an e-mail for renewal, may be a good idea), 2. These posts should contain visible contact information, the visitor should not need to create an account in order to see the contact information (believe it or not creating accounts discourages many people). Things like this already exist, I know, however they tend to be tied to a certain repository host, overflowing with outdated information, or in general simply not given the attention they need to thrive and be a hot-spot for contributors to find projects. I think that with the FSF behind such a project it would help the Free Software community to take advantage of all of these people who are eager to contribute but trying to find a good place to start. -- Nicolás A. Ortega (Deathsbreed) https://themusicinnoise.net/ http://uk7ewohr7xpjuaca.onion/ Public PGP Key: https://themusicinnoise.net/deathsbreed@themusicinnoise.net_pub.asc http://uk7ewohr7xpjuaca.onion/deathsbreed@themusicinnoise.net_pub.asc
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