[Devel] OpenHatch asks, "What are you avoiding working on?"

[Asheesh Laroia]

(Context: I asked Kartik what he thought about posting our "What are you 
avoiding working on?" blog post to news.ycombinator.com AKA "Hacker News")

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010, Kartik Agaram wrote:

> Just finished reading it. I like it!
>
> I'd leave the title as is. Would you like me to submit?

I would have, but...

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010, Kartik Agaram wrote:

> I wonder if you could design a signup page *just* for that use case. I 
> am thinking a link that asks people a question just like twitter. When 
> they hit submit it pops up a box to create an account. It might be a way 
> to get a few users out of this essay. The directions you currently give 
> would be useless to most HN users - they just won't follow a 3-step 
> process that involves signing up as the first step.

I'm playing with Twitter right now. The front page is just a search box, 
and the "Sign up now" button is labeled "Join the conversation".

As I understand it, you're asking for an easy path to click from the blog 
post into actually writing the thing the user is putting off working on.

The problem is, we may not have a page for that person's project. That's 
why (signing in + adding the project) are the first two steps. Adding a 
project to your ownprofile is the easiest way to create a project page 
for it on OpenHatch.

So here's a UI proposal for how that could work.

* In the blog post, we'd ask people to go to our project list 
<https://openhatch.org/+projects/>.

* We would improve this page so that, for non-logged-in users, there's a 
text field up top: "Is your project not listed? What's its name?" (For 
logged-in users, we would ask them to add it to their profile.)

* Then that would create a project page and take you there immediately.

* Then you can answer the question there.

* Finally, at save time, we offer them an easy sign-in button. "Sign in 
with your Google account (or other OpenID) to publish this!"

Right now, we allow non-logged-in users to contribute answers. We could 
change that, so that you have to log in, but also make it super easy to 
log in.

Thoughts on the above?

(Please keep devel at lists.openhatch.org CC:d on this discussion, if that's 
okay with you!)

-- Asheesh.

-- 
Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no one can say what
is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
 		-- John Kenneth Galbraith