[Devel] On removing people from the "I want to help!" list if they are already a contributor

[will kahn-greene]

If OpenHatch had a way to blast out an email to all the people listed as
"I want to help", then being a contributor and being listed is useful.

I think of the "I want to help" list as being there for people who want
to help and this is how they're reflecting their interest and also for
people who want to help a bunch of projects, but in a "sprint" fashion,
but not long-term commitment fashion.

For example, at some point I'd like to do a sprint on PyBlosxom stuff to
(finally) get version 1.5 out the door.  I'd send an email to the users
list, the developers list, and then it'd be nice to blast out an email
to all the "I want to help" people.  The latter catches the people who
aren't regular contributors to the project and thus aren't on the
mailing lists, but are interested in doing sprints from time to time.

Is that a valid use case (knowing I can't currently blast out an email
to all the people who want to help)?  If so, then I think we should keep
it as is.


On 02/25/2011 09:35 AM, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> We have a bug targeted for this milestone
> <https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue304> for making it so that if you are a
> contributor to a project, you can't get listed in the "I want to help!"
> list of people.
> 
> I thought about this some, and I'm having some second thoughts about the
> feature. Krzysztof, forgive me for bringing this up so late in the
> release cycle and after you have already submitted patches (at
> https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue304 ).
> 
> Here are some early-morning, meandering thoughts:
> 
> * There are some contributors who probably do want to be told what to do
> next. For example, if you usually write code but want to help out with
> website stuff, then maybe you want to click "I want to help". But then
> on the other hand, maybe you're part of the community enough now to be
> able to just ask the people in it. But realistically that's not always
> true.
> 
> * One of the major causes of people+projects showing up on the front
> page of openhatch.org is what appears to be project maintainers clicking
> "I wanna help" and then causing the front page to mention their project.
> I'm loathe to decrease visible activity on the front page!
> 
> On the other hand, just taking a sec to skim the feed, one other good
> way to make your project appear on the front page is to write an answer
> to a project page question. That seems like an okay way to get your
> project on the feed, actually, so maybe it's okay if self-wanna-help
> doesn't put you on the front page.
> 
> But I'm kind of confused. What do you all think?
> 
> -- Asheesh.
>