[Peers] Idea: Creating criteria for deciding which open source projects are good for newcomers

[Asheesh Laroia]

Howdy Peers,

Pre-preface
-----------

First of all, truly hello! Some of you may have missed the news of my 
personal move back to San Francisco, and others might have missed the news 
of OpenHatch moving in the non-profit direction since a year ago.


Preface
-------

Karen Rustad and I gave a talk at OSCON a few weeks ago in which we 
discussed how many open source projects haven't "user tested" their 
Getting Involved pages.

By that, I mean that if you took the supposed target audience for most 
projects' "Get involved" pages and sat someone down in front of them, 
there would be important information left unexplained. In the talk, I gave 
a somewhat facile example from the nano-editor FAQ:

Q. How do I contribute to it?

A. Your best bet is to send it to the nano email address, 
nano at nano-editor.org and if it is useful enough it will be included in 
future versions.

The joke I made goes: "Send *what* to the nano email address?"

It's actually unclear, in my opinion. Someone who uses (for example) 
Ubuntu, and uses nano daily because they're a sysadmin and programmer, and 
wants to get involved in an open source project might want to contribute 
code to nano, but if they haven't learned what a "patch" is, they won't 
know what to send there.


Idea
----

Selena Deckelmann (who just joined the board as an observer! Welcome to 
her) watched our walk-throughs of three projects:

* nano (which we declared needed some work -- mostly, it needs a link to 
the website in the help available within the app), and

* GNOME (through the GNOME Love wiki pages, which are reasonably good but 
easy to get lost in), and

* LibreOffice, where their pages on "Easy Hacks" are just totally awesome.

She and I chatted afterward, and we agreed OpenHatch should create 
criteria on which to judge open source projects' "Get involved" pages and 
mark them as "Green-light for new contributors" (meeting basically all our 
criteria), "Warning light for new contributors" (because the page fails a 
large number of tests), or "Red light for new contributors" (because they 
fail a bunch of these criteria). (Then we could even write "A state of the 
Getting-Involved Pages" report afterward.)

What I'd like to see is a very clear set of criteria on a page on the 
OpenHatch wiki. Once the criteria are agreed-upon, we can start to do the 
"2012 OpenHatch New Contributor Pages Evaluation".

For now, I'd love to collect ideas on objective things we can all use to 
evaluate about get-involved pages for projects. Also, if you think this is 
an especially-good or especially-boring idea, say so. (-:

-- Asheesh.

P.S. Now that I've put these thoughts into words, I think the best thing 
might be to go through a few (or a few dozen) "getting involved" pages and 
write a short outline of the good points and bad points about each one. It 
might be great to get others involved in that, too. Then we can reverse 
that list to identify the common problems, verify those with people who 
are new to open source, and work from there.