[gnome-love] OpenHatch.org indexing "gnome-love" bugs, and other ways to get new people involved

[Asheesh Laroia <asheesh openhatch org>]

Hey GNOME lovers,

https://openhatch.org/search/?q=&toughness=bitesize shows "bite-size" bugs
across free software. It's a search engine for new contributors looking
for something to do. I was inspired by GNOME Love when I heard about it,
and I've since discovered many projects do something similar. We index
a bunch of bug trackers, including GNOME Bugzilla's gnome-love bugs.

Of note, you can also search for not just coding bugs, but requests for
documentation. We rely on the tags people label bugs with in bug trackers,
and right now we have only found the Python (language) project marking
bugs that way. Do GNOME projects use a tag like gnome-love that means
a bug is an issue with or request for documentation?

I wonder if you guys would be interested in poking around the site and telling
me what you think. I think this list and OpenHatch have a common goal of
getting people involved in free and open source software. (-:

One more thing I want to draw to your attention is our "I want to help" button
that lives on project pages. Check out (for example) the Python project page
on OpenHatch at https://openhatch.org/+projects/Python . There's a big green
"I want to help" button up top, and when you mouse-over it, it tells you that
"People of all levels are welcome!" I'm interested to see what happens if people
simply register their interest; then someone involved in the project can
suggest something for that person to work on, based on the skills and interests
of that person.

This could be a big boon for people who don't normally see their skills as relevant
to contributing to open source, or people who are a bit too shy to just click on
a bug, hunt for the source to a program, and start patching. For example, people
who can contribute design or app testing help usually don't have any gnome-love bugs
to start working on, but they could make a project maintainer's life easier.

So I want to make a request -- do any GNOME projects want to put "I want to help" buttons
on their own websites? There's easy copy-paste HTML source on every project page.
I think that would be great.

Thanks for reading so far! Let me know what you think.

-- Asheesh.

P.S. If you like what we're up to, consider staying in touch outside the GNOME-Love list.

Blog: https://openhatch.org/blog/
Twitter or Identi.ca: @openhatchery
IRC: I'm paulproteus approximately everywhere, such as #openhatch on freenode
     and #gnome-love on GIMPNet.

(And email is good too!)

-- 
Q:      What is purple and concord the world?
A:      Alexander the Grape.