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18F / open-source-policy

This repository contains the official Open Source Policy of 18F
https://18f.gsa.gov
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Engaging the Public via GitHub w/ 'help wanted' tags & roadmapped issues #26

Closed rebeccawilliams closed 9 years ago

rebeccawilliams commented 9 years ago

I am not sure if this belongs in the Open Source Policy or is more of a cultural/soft policy, but it'd be great to see 18F by default engage the public with 'help wanted' tags and with straightforward issues that roadmap what needs to be done next, e.g. Code for America's workflow. It'd be great to have the public directly contributing to government projects more.

gbinal commented 9 years ago

Def. agree.

konklone commented 9 years ago

I know @leahbannon has been thinking about this, too. I'm not sure how we actually spell it out, but I think we have a few projects doing this already.

leahbannon commented 9 years ago

Yes, but it will require frequent bugging of people. Not sure about the best approach.

konklone commented 9 years ago

Something to tie into the dashboard? A little view of a project's open tasks? If/when the dashboard becomes more visible and teams become more aware of their appearance on it, it could motivate more attention.

janearc commented 9 years ago

I like @leahbannon's approach during the hackathon of "if you want help with something, tag it." And then have that pulled in automatically somewhere. It should not require frequent bugging of people; we should ask them, you know, once, or twice, and they should just be doing it. It's source code hygiene; nobody "bugged" me to do it with Sendak. I saw it was the convention elsewhere and just started doing it. There are things that are not a good candidate for "external help" or would be difficult to wade into without knowing much. Things that are good candidates, I readily tag. I expect people to be looking.

We also talk about it being hard to find people that are a good fit for 18F. We have certain strictures about what we can and cannot say about finding those people. Can we for example say "hey, if you want to get our attention on something, there's hardly a better way than to go fix it and send us a PR" (cc: @quepol).

leahbannon commented 9 years ago

@rebeccawilliams have you seen CfA detail that workflow anywhere? That might be helpful.

rebeccawilliams commented 9 years ago

I'm not sure if it's a formal policy there or just @ondrae being @ondrae :smile: He might be able to say more.

rebeccawilliams commented 9 years ago

Just to add I don't think you need to bug folks about this, but just be in the habit of tagging and outlining things for you or the public to work on next/never assuming the help will come, but making collaboration as accessible as possible.

I agree too it's a good way to identify candidates for hiring.

konklone commented 9 years ago

OK, I'm going to close this as an "open source policy" issue in the tracker, but am encouraged by the discussion and hoping we do more tagging.

rebeccawilliams commented 9 years ago

I will note that I opened this issue because I thought this should be documented somewhere other than in a closed issue that was hopeful.

konklone commented 9 years ago

@leahbannon @janearc @rebeccawilliams Maybe a good candidate for a PR adding a paragraph to the team practice doc in this repo about it? The intent is for this document to be part of the 18F team onboarding process. It'd be helpful for it to link to resources that show incoming teammates the value of adding this to their projects' workflow -- maybe that's just the CFA stuff, maybe there's other things.

webmaven commented 9 years ago

Is there a proccess doc on starting new repos? If so, a note there on which issue tags/labels to create, what they mean/signal, and how/when to use them would probably be useful.

janearc commented 9 years ago

tags vary by repo.

webmaven commented 9 years ago

tags vary by repo.

Well, yes, but shouldn't there be some fairly standard ones in common (such as help-wanted)?

I saw it was the convention elsewhere and just started doing it.

All I am suggesting is that the common(est) conventions be documented.

rebeccawilliams commented 9 years ago

:+1: to @webmaven's pitch to have the most common tags or at least the help-wanted tag documented somewhere. This doesn't have to dictate a top down workflow for all projects, but having consistency across the Contributing.md files and use of a help-wanted tag can help signal 18F's welcoming of public contributions.

gbinal commented 9 years ago

Good ideas - thanks, @webmaven, @rebeccawilliams.

konklone commented 9 years ago

I turned this into a PR in #29.

gbinal commented 9 years ago

FYI, govcode.org is looking to start integrating the help-wanted tag.