Regarding a 'Help Wanted' system (which I would hope could be generic enough that other open-source groups could use / fork if desired). Here are a few rough thoughts:
I’ve been mulling over building a system that accumulates various todos from across Ember repos (and, in the future, other, highly used or "blessed" add-ons as well). Initially, my thought would be that it would ease setting up open source nights for meetups around the world (instead of organizers having to go through various repos and hand-pick them). The goal would be for this tool to help ease the "onramp" for new contributors into the Ember world and increase the pool of folks contributing to Ember. But it would also be a way to draw attention to key needs in order to more rapidly get major pieces of work split up and dealt with efficiently.
Future ideas for expansion could include automatically tweeting out new issues so that folks could follow "needs help" tags (and we might split this into 'per repo' streams so that folks could track only certain repos). We might also consider an email system (something akin to what is done by http://www.codetriage.com) to allow people to express interest in getting emails once a week (or something like that). CodeTriage has had issues with people actually following through and not feeling pestered, so I would want to explore this option only if there was a ton of interest expressed in this idea.
A first version however would be much akin to what I have setup already at https://ember-hitlist.pagefrontapp.com
For that to actually be an MVP, I think there are five things remaining that need to be addressed:
- auto-populating issues based on a few tags for the repos we follow (see below). This could be push based (repo admins setup webhooks to notify our system) or polling-based (poll Github every 4 hrs or once a night)
- auto-closing issues (would probably need to be polling based, but could also be notified via webhooks)
- setting up a system to receive the webhook notifications / handle polling (would envision this being a Heroku app in the interests of keeping things cheap / free)
- reworking our data storage system (to use EmberFire / Firebase or some other free data store instead of Google Spreadsheets) because Spreadsheets is read-only and we'll need a way to write some basic data (see below)
- build a way to "claim" an item (by one or more people). Might need to have this "unlock" after one week to indicate that it still needs help
Repos to track to start with (we can add to this once we've seen that it's actually useful :-)
- https://github.com/emberjs/guides
- https://github.com/emberjs/website
- https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js
- https://github.com/ember-cli/ember-cli
Interested in your thoughts! Please contact me at @acorncom on Twitter or @acorncom on the Ember slack in the #-learning channel :-)
Gist comments apparently don't send notifications to the Gist owner, so comments here probably aren't as useful ;-)