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It would be really nice to be able to log in with github, since many project owners already have a github account.
That's something we just got an email about earlier in the month, though no one has filed a bug to formally request it yet. I just took a moment to do that: https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue925
If you want to add yourself as "Nosy" then you'll hear about updates to that, as the community gets moving on in it.
(I'm one of the original people who started OpenHatch and on the board of the non-profit.) Thanks to sedeki for letting other people know!
* Remove some of the MySQL-specific query syntax to make faceted search at openhatch.org/search/ work nicely. A goal of the current implementation is that if you search for "C" you won't find "C++". We implement this by a crazy hack of MySQL REGEX queries, which are (iirc) always unindexed, which is bad news under load. We should probably switch this to client-side faceted search, as here in 2014, it's safe to assume people have Javascript.
* Stop using synchronous requests.get() to fill the cache of blog posts that . The problem here is that if the cache is empty, every web worker will try to fill it. This leads to massive queuing of inbound requests, which is always bad news.
- Use CloudFlare in front of us, so at least people get reasonable error messages, and so static resources don't bother our server.
It's still not the speediest site in the world, but it's mostly handling the traffic, from what I can tell.
I filed these as bugs:
* https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue927
* https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue928
If you're interested in helping out, by all means join us. We love new contributors. Over 26 people contributed to the codebase in 2013, and per http://openhatch.readthedocs.org/en/latest/getting_started/i... we've tested the dev environment setup process on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it should take 10 or fewer minutes.
We're working on something similar, but to match developers up with scientific, conservation and charitable projects that need help. I'm not interested in hijacking this thread, but if anyone wants to be kept informed, my email is in my profile.
We've found over the years that having one specific task for new contributors to complete makes a huge difference in attracting that next contributor. See http://mairin.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/second-fedora-design-... for a really successful effort along those lines.
If you want to join #openhatch or join http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events/ and chat with us, we'd be happy to see if there are ways we can both learn from each other!
We've had similar feedback about specific tasks from the very few people we've shown the site to so far, and hearing it from you hammers it home.
At the moment we're at the stage of recruiting initial projects. We'd love to talk to you guys, and will drop along to the IRC room :).
A very reasonable thing would be to think about the various ways people are learning open source-related skills, and make a badge site, and then make sure the places where learning happens also participate in badge publication.
If that interests any reader of this comment, we'd love to hear about it! Joinhttp://lists.openhatch.org/devel and say so.
We're really excited about that, too, and if you join the IRC channel, we'll do our best to connect you with a project.
Additionally, I wrote this:
http://opensource-usability.blogspot.com/2013/12/guest-post-...
that I would love your thoughts on.
When it comes to UX, I don't believe you can design by committee, but everyone feels they should have a say in the process (and if you've contributed to the code of a project, you probably feel an even stronger sense of ownership which is perfectly natural and understandable). As soon as someone feels their UX suggestions are ignored, it causes so much resentment. The result is often a distrustful and even resentful relationship between design and development. This is such a familiar scenario in the Open Source community particularly for large Open Source projects.
Here's a small example from the Blender community that illustrates the difficulty in reconciling different views about UX. It's a Youtube video of a presentation at the 2013 Blender Conference (Oct 2013) on improving the Blender UI. In the Q&A after the presentation, one audience member (rightfully) says we shouldn't treat users as idiots, but then adds that making Blender easier to use might entail "dumbing down" the app - this elicits a round of applause from the audience. Dependending on your point of view, that's a perfectly legitimate concern or a depressing misunderstanding about ease-of-use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIA2LaB2Iw&feature=share&t=3...
My impression is that there's a fractious relationship between design/UX and development in the open source community that hasn't changed much over the years (I'm not pinning the blame on any one camp). How to solve this, I just don't know. I'm glad that we're having a debate about it and it would be good to hear more from other developers and designers on this subject.
Really happy to see this come to life, good luck.
The concept, however, is much needed.
I filed https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue926 so we don't forget to find out more about it.