Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

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> Is CodeShelter community-owned and driven? Or is it a company?

It's community-owned, there's no company.

> The website codebase has no license and the Github application code is not open-source (or I overlooked).

The website codebase is licensed under BSD, and the source is linked at the footer of every page:

https://gitlab.com/codeshelter/codeshelter-web

The website is also in the Code Shelter itself, so any maintainer can commit.

> There's no privacy policy, ToS, and CoC.

I don't know what the first two would be good for, as it doesn't really have personal data to be private about? I guess there's the list of maintainers per project, but it's all public.

> What is the maintainer vetting process?

This is detailed here (where the "become a maintainer" button on the front page goes):

https://www.codeshelter.co/membership/

> How is matchmaking taking place?

Maintainers select a project they like, they click a button, and they get commit rights to it.

> What can I expect after giving away control?

This is detailed here (where the "add a project to the Shelter" button on the front page goes):

https://www.codeshelter.co/projects/add/

I appreciate the feedback, but these are all easily-accessible pages, linked from the front page. I'm not sure how to make them more easily accessible than that, sadly.

Ah, forgive me about the website license, I was looking for a LICENSE file. Not used to Gitlab that sets it at repo level.

Privacy policy is needed when you have a login and use e.g. the Github app. Even while you delegate everything to Github, you have access to some personal information. A relatively simple privacy policy should make you GDPR-compliant.

ToS may be too formal, and FAQ can be enough. CoC I'd definitely include.

As for matchmaking. Can any maintainer chime in once I joined? Or can I select the ones that can have access, and others I rather not grant that? Can I be assured that maintainers use the dev process of my preference? I guess CODESHELTER.md should describe that last bit.

The website content is not bad at all. Still, honing it further might lower the barrier to use. Hope this small chunk of extra feedback is helpful.

This is great, thanks! I'll ass a privacy policy and look into a CoC, thanks.

Any maintainer can be added to the repo, yes. The idea is that there will be a community-driven process around ensuring that maintainers are following the creators' guidelines (and ensuring they adhere to the CoC), so it wasn't meant to be so enforced by technology.

I should add a LICENSE file to the repo, now that you mention it, people will expect it there.

Thanks for the additional feedback!

I had another thought, more unformed, and mostly only relevant once 'popularity strikes'. Maybe not relevant at all. Suppose a maintainer gets a real liking for a particular project, develops a passion and invests a load of time. They can be rug-pulled at any time when the project owner - on a whim - decides help is no longer needed. The project owners freedom is assured. They can do anything, like take the project commercial and go proprietary from then on. This might cause big "drama" esp. when a maintainer also built community. It might not reflect badly on Code Shelter, but may be something to think about these situations.

Yeah, there are definitely a bunch of edge cases like this, but the main problem right now is that there aren't enough people for these to even happen, so having that sort of stuff to deal with would be a good problem to have.

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