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#community-development
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2021-01-29
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Vincent Cantin14:01:56

Is there a channel where project maintainers are posting their needs for contributors? Something similar to announcement, but also for unreleased w.i.p. projects?

Vincent Cantin14:01:59

If not, I suggest to create one, for instance #contributors-needed

Vincent Cantin14:01:41

What do you think about the idea, and how to make it work?

practicalli-johnny14:01:48

@vincent.cantin There is #pr-welcome which I believe is their for the purpose you describe

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practicalli-johnny14:01:58

To make this work maintainers 'only' need to document the design of their project, provide any guidelines for contributions they expect people to follow and ideally highlight issues that are most suitable to tackle for people new to the project.

Vincent Cantin14:01:20

Is this channel known? I never heard of it. Is it promoted from time to time here and there?

borkdude14:01:02

@vincent.cantin I have created this channel with the same goal in mind

Vincent Cantin14:01:01

How many times have you mention about it on other channels like #announcement?

borkdude14:01:21

There is also #releases where you can post releases of projects that you would not post in announcements, because maybe it's just a maintenance release.

Vincent Cantin14:01:23

(not sure if it would be the right place)

borkdude14:01:43

I don't have any stats on how many times I mentioned it, maybe you could do an analysis of clojurians logs ;)

borkdude14:01:14

I have never mentioned it in announcements, since that is only for libraries. I did mention it in off-topic and probably on Twitter

Vincent Cantin14:01:38

As it is for the benefit of our community's development, I would like to ask the opinion of the admins about announcing it in one of the announcement channels.

Vincent Cantin14:01:34

(message already forwarded to the admins)

practicalli-johnny14:01:51

I'd suggest that people are mostly going to be driven to contribute to those projects they already visit that project code repository. I would be surprised if a slack channel would gain much interest, when issues should be well documented on that project issue tracker. If it is valuable to mention #pr-welcome channel, then perhaps do so as part of a legitimate post made to the #announcements channel, announcing a valuable update to the project, also ensuring the project has docs to help people contribute and issues that have been marked as good first issues.

Vincent Cantin14:01:59

The problem is that many project maintainers won't use #announcements until they have a release. For example the project Girouette is not released yet but needs contributors.

dharrigan15:01:51

maybe #help-wanted as an alternative to #pr-welcome Speaking only for myself, being a lazy (in the good sense) programmer, help could be anything, like a bit of code review, documentation read - it may not involve doing a pr each time 🙂

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Vincent Cantin15:01:37

The problem with "help-wanted" is that some people might think of the channel as a place where they can get help, like in #beginners

dharrigan15:01:51

yes, good point 🙂

Vincent Cantin15:01:20

How about #contributors-needed or #contributors-wanted ?

dharrigan15:01:08

nay! only a suggestion 'tho 🙂

Vincent Cantin15:01:31

#help-wanted sound more appealing. I just noticed that Slack allows to rename existing channels. @borkdude do you think a rename of #pr-welcome would be a good idea?

borkdude15:01:38

I'll rename it

eggsyntax15:01:06

The downside of using the name #help-wanted is that in the US at least, that phrase means "looking to hire" -- seems likely to confuse.

dharrigan15:01:16

A good point was raised by Vincent re: it may be confusing for beginnners 🙂

borkdude15:01:22

maybe contributions-welcome?

eggsyntax15:01:26

As I was typing that I noticed that there's also #side-project-help

dharrigan15:01:56

I saw that too, but <shrug> bit of a strange name imho.

dharrigan15:01:09

In the sense of who's? side project?

borkdude15:01:17

I did "contributions-welcome" now.

Vincent Cantin15:01:20

IMHO, "-welcome" is not explicit enough

borkdude15:01:03

It's not that I can't solve the issues necessarily, it's also a way for me to provide issues for people to get started on some project.

borkdude15:01:26

Not all projects "welcome" contributions

borkdude15:01:54

Anyway, I'll revert to pr-welcome since I don't think we will reach one name that everyone will agree on ;)

Vincent Cantin15:01:22

contribution-welcome is already better 🙂

borkdude15:01:08

ok, one last time then ;)

dharrigan15:01:06

Naming is such a hard thing to do 😉

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Vincent Cantin15:01:05

All parents would agree that the real problem is not to name things but to agree on names.