Support for contributors who are new to OSS

[stackoverfloweth]

It would be awesome to see supporting features for new OSS contributors that need some more hand holding. The obvious ideas that I have are

• show repositories that are newer/smaller so they are easier to jump into
• highlight repositories that have issues like good-first-issue

[bdougie]

Thanks for the feedback. These are some good ideas and things will approach soon.

One thing to do this today is leveraging our discord and watch watching the cool github projects channel. These projects tend to be newer and up and coming with a need for new contributors.

Approachability or easy to jump into is interesting. I think we could approach it in a few ways but my bias would be towards sharing projects with high percentages of new contributors. Simply marking a project as good first repo might not warrant the results folks are looking for since good first repos don’t they good first repos long because a team tends to form and knowledge eventually grows in a way where documentation becomes the biggest need.

It perhaps documentation filters are needed as well.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. The team watches this discussion and sourced ideas here.

[stackoverfloweth]

thanks @bdougie, I'll definitely join the discord and see what I can find.

I can see how labeling a repository as "good first repo" is potentially a bad idea, I think an "approachability score" is something every repo would be happy to score high in. I'm thinking things like neat issues, good readme, well documented procedures, etc.

[antonio-pedro99]

check my comment below

[antonio-pedro99]

Hi @stackoverfloweth, I understand how it is hard to find a way to start contributing to open source. These good-first-issue are no doubt a good start point.

As an open-source community lead at Angola Open-source Community, I have seen many newbies struggling finding these issue that interest them. So we have created a discord bot to help them find these kinds of issue that best match their interests.
The bot is open-source, and you can use it in any discord server. Please take a look https://github.com/angolaosc/savanna-bot.
How to use this bot is very similar to the way we search stuff on GitHub, example:
/svn owner:open-sauced would return this

As I said, you can use any GitHub search query, the bot is not limited.

[antonio-pedro99]

@bdougie This bot can also be used on open-sauced discord server.