On recruiting contributors (through Openhatch)

[impaktor]

Introduction
This post is about if we should have a profile on Openhatch. It is a community aimed at matching contributors with FOSS projects. Their interest is to make open source more welcome to newcomers. They currently track 900 FOSS projects openhatch.org/projects/, which can be found through their volunteer data base openhatch.org/search/


What Openhatch does
Their main work is to organize one day Open source comes to campus-workshops, at various universities, where college students (on average 20-30 at each event) get to find a project they want to work on. They have a mentor who helps them read bug reports, get the source tree, submit code, and navigate the code base to find where to look for the bug/fix/feature.

The students are mostly into computer science but others can be into design, user experience and other fields. They try to emphasize that contributing to FOSS doesn't mean you have to code. (This blog post details how one grows and learns by contributing to projects.)

While I was talking to them on #openhatch, they recommended me some links, like how to get contributors or how to contribute, which I post here just for completeness.

Perhaps worth mentioning is that Openhatch is not affiliated with any particular university.


What Openhatch can do for Pioneer
If pioneer is registered on openhatch, their automatic bug scraper will crawl our github, and expose our bugs and feature requests for their contributors to find during their workshops.

One thing they often help FOSS projects with is to advise them on how to lower the threshold to go from user to contributor. E.g. making it easier for players to start talking with the devs, since this is the first step to become a contributor (I think we're good here). Or to translate the home page to several languages to reach a wider audience (something we could improve). Those we just some ideas they gave me.

Being on openhatch would obviously also give us some more exposure, both long term, and short term through their newsletter informing of new projects added, and upcoming workshops, and through their tweets.


What we need to do to get there
What is required on our part is to fill out a form to register us on the site, and that is pretty much it, as I've understood it. No real "maintenance" on our part is needed from this point, but since the automated bug scraping isn't 100%, it doesn't hurt to occasionally check in on it.

So, I'd like to check here if it is OK if I attempt to sign us up for an account for pioneerspacesim there? (I'd naturally like to share login with the pioneer core team, once that is done).

[FluffyFreak]

I don't really have much of an opinion on this, getting fresh contributors could be good but I see a lot of those projects and no games. Did I just miss them?

If you're interested in trying it though, and I can't see how it would be a bad thing for us (<-- famous last words), then I say go for it.

Andy

[impaktor]

I don't really have much of an opinion on this

Honestly, I'm of the same opinion and so was robn, but I figured I'd check if anyone here had a "No" or "Yes" on the matter.

The few days I've spent in #openhatch have been very quiet but a few people have come by looking for a project to contribute, which surprised me. I always assumed FOSS contributions came from the users themselves.

I'm just slightly worried about the future of pioneer now that robn and jpab have (temporarily?) stepped down, and lwho is only heard from occasionally and Luomu and Brianetta have quit, we're down to a single professional programmer, in yourself.

I'm not expecting miracles from Openhatch, but at least we've done our part to get a bit more exposure to potential contributors.

[FluffyFreak]

Ah I see, well then, go for it :)

[impaktor]

An update on this:

I created an account on openhatch shortly after my first post in this thread in December last year, and added pioneer. Any user can add, remove or edit any other project page, which is a bit scary perhaps. So there is no official "pioneer" account needed to edit the pioneer project on openhatch.

Our project site: https://openhatch.org/projects/pioneer

However, the bug scraping of our issue tracker didn't work, and for two weeks I was talking with the devs on their IRC (they're all in US I think, so all replies took a day cycle), and eventually we realized none of the github hosted projects were being bug scraped properly by their bot. I created an issue in early January:
https://github.com/openhatch/oh-mainline/issues/1515

And it was finally resolved a few days ago, so at least now some of our issues are being displayed on their site.

I've created a new issue for the remaining potential bug they might have:
https://github.com/openhatch/oh-bugimporters/issues/117

[BanthaMan]

I found the pioneer repo through openhatch :)

[impaktor]

Yay! You're most likely the very first to do so.

[impaktor]

It's over.
http://blog.openhatch.org/2017/celebrat ... anization/

[FluffyFreak]

Damn that's a shame.