Beginner Issues!

[Giovanni Idili]

Hi OpenWorm community, 

There are always plenty of volunteers (coders and not) who are enthusiastic about helping OpenWorm, but the single biggest obstacle in getting help from the community has been so far the ability to direct volunteers to self-explanatory tasks that can be worked on immediately without having multiple meetings or long exchanges. There are always plenty of these tasks on most repositories, but they are often hard to spot!

A few of us in the engineering committee have been playing around with the idea of promoting beginner issues across all OpenWorm repositories as a way to have well defined tasks that any volunteer with very little (or zero) OpenWorm background (but experienced on relevant technologies/tools) can get immediately started on. 

To make it easier for contributors who are managing OpenWorm repositories to create beginner issues, we have created an issue template on the OpenWorm root repo. So now every time an issue gets created at the organization level (recommended for high level tasks) the template will kick in and it will provide you with a checklist of TODOs to follow if you want to make your issue a beginner issue:

If you want to adopt this model on sub-repositories under the OpenWorm organization you are currently working on, you can do so by placing the same template in your repo, as in the example here.

This is of course up to who's maintaining and creating the issues for each repository - but the bottomline is, if you want help from the community and you think the task qualifies (of course not all tasks can be beginner tasks!), why not take a minute to follow the simple guidelines and at the very least slap the 'beginner' tag on it when you're done creating the issue.

If we start doing this as a community it will be very easy to filter for beginner issues for any repository so volunteers can be pointed to these tasks and hackers who are lurking for easy picks can easily spot them.

Happy festive coding and see you around github!

Cheers,

Giovanni Idili

Engineer / Co-founder @OpenWorm

OpenWorm Foundation 

[Alexander McLin]

One giant thumb up for this!

Alexander

[James Weakley]

Seconded!