[Devel] Discussion between me and dhaun (Dirk) from Geeklog

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey all,

dhaun is Dirk from Geeklog, the one whose happy story I posted to the list 
a few days ago. I found him by email and asked him some questions. Here's 
what I got back from him.

(-:,

-- Asheesh.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 04:40:12
From: Dirk Haun
To: Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org>
Subject: Re: Question about OpenHatch and Geeklog

Hey Asheesh,

> We're working on getting a sense of where the website helps people, and how it can be more useful. We're having a meeting at 4 PM US/Eastern today (soon!) on IRC: http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/devel/2011-February/001747.html -- we're going to talk about what we should work on for the next month. (I'm paulproteus on IRC.)

Sorry, I was at FOSDEM over the weekend and couldn't hang out on IRC. I do usually lurk in #openhatch. My nick is dhaun.


> I'm one of the people who works on OpenHatch. I noticed that you mentioned at http://www.geeklog.net that Rouslan found a way to contribute to Geeklog from our website.
>
> That's super cool! Can you tell me anything more about his experience, or or maybe your own in putting up the tasks on the site?

Thanks for asking. There are actually a few things about OpenHatch that I think could be improved.

The main issue, IMO, is that things are somewhat disconnected. For example, I'm registered as a contributor for Geeklog and also offered to mentor. So when people indicate that they want to help, I think there should be a way for me to easily contact them. Maybe even send me an email automatically.

The way things are now, I have to visit openhatch.org regularly to find out if somebody's interested in helping out. Okay, so I get a list of people. Then what? There should be an easy way to contact these people. Yes, I can email them. But I'd prefer a web form that already provides some context, e.g. "I'm contacting you since you indicated on OpenHatch that you want to help Geeklog", etc. Ideally, people should be able to pick one or more of the listed tasks when they say that they want to help. I, as a potential mentor, should then be able to see that list and it should also be included when I email them.

In other words: Right now, OpenHatch provides 3 lists: Tasks, mentors + contributors, and potential helpers. But to make a connection between the 3 takes too much additional effort. I think this could be made to be much easier. I don't insist that what I described above is the ideal workflow. But somehow, it should require less work to get potential helpers and mentors together. All the pieces are there, it's the connection between them that's missing, IMHO.

bye, Dirk