[Peers] a complicated idea

[Mustafa Abdel-Tawwab]

Hi, I'm Mustafa, a junior developer from Egypt.
I'd like to thank you for the effort that you put in this project;
I've been looking for ways to contribute to open source since forever,
and I think this could very much be my first step.
I just had this idea about how you can make things a little more
interesting for newcomers; if you can put something like leveling into
it -people familiar with freelancer.com - or RPGs - will know what I'm
talking about, so if you can help me when my post gets a little
ambiguous, that would be great :)-.
For example, a new-comer will come to your site and register. Now, he
is a level-0 newcomer. To level-up, he will need to go through the
training missions you've posted. Now, he can commit to projects,
create patches, applying patches, etc; and now he's a level-1
newcomer. Still, based on his low level, it is not recommended for him
to jump into problems right away; he will need to know if he has what
it takes to start in those problems; for example, he should be
familiar with the technologies that are used in that software - or in
a specific portion of the software -; and based on that, a number of
recommendation will be available to him to participate in -also based
on his level, for example a level-1 newcomer will work better with
bitesize problems-; and the more contribution he adds to projects, the
more points he gains, and subsequently, more levels; and maybe if he
passes a specific level, he can become a mentor. Another addition
could be some simple tests in specific technologies that will decide
if he can tackle specific missions; for example, a simple tkinter test
could indicate that a user has a fair amount of knowledge in tkinter
that he can work with specific applications that does not require
advanced knowledge in tkinter. Also, it would be greatly helpful if
bugs could be marked by tags to indicate the technologies that are
thought to be needed to deal with this bug; for example, a bug in a
chat client may only need some simple gui work for tkinter, so a
developer who is tagged with tkinter skills - and maybe no network
programming skills at all - can tackle it with no worries. Honestly, I
don't know where to go from here - i haven't started contributing to
open-source yet, so i can't know how it works -, but if you think that
idea could work, or a similar idea, that would be great.
Another related thing, there should be a mention of the technologies
used with each software; for example, evince is programmed with C with
small C++ parts that interacts with a pdf-rendering library called
poppler. That should be mentioned in the project info, to better match
contributors who know these technologies with corresponding projects
One more thing -sorry; a long post, I know- is to add a field for the
open-source apps the contributor uses frequently, as they are likely
to be the most suitable for him to work with.
Again, sorry for the long post; and again, thank you very much for the
effort you're putting into such a wonderful project.
Mustafa