[RFC] "guided contributions" section on site

[nukeop]

I have added my project to up-for-grabs some time ago and since then it helped many people interesting in contributing find it. Many of those people were new to open source in general, and some of them made their first contributions in my project, which is great.

After a couple of such contributions I came up with the idea of guided contributions. While normal up-for-grabs issues are tagged so that contributors can easily identify issues which will be relatively straightforward to solve, I propose a new category. The issues tagged "guided contribution" would come with a guarantee that the person implementing them will be given high quality guidance from project maintainers. It's like an interactive lesson, targeted at people who are new to contributing. This presumes a high degree of involvement from the maintainers. The contributor is solving a real life issue, while being walked through it to some degree (enough so that they don't get stuck, but while remaining their own work). One contributor told me that it's a valuable experience for people who are trying to graduate from youtube tutorials while not necessarily being so confident as to start their own project.

This new category could be given its own page on up-for-grabs, or maybe it could be a separate website altogether.

[ritwik12]

@nukeop That's a good thing, We can do this by simply having a tag of this type in the projects where this will be applicable. This is something that is to be done by the project owners while submitting their projects to up-for-grabs. one thing that I think we can help with is to Popularize and aware people about this tag. We can do this either by adding it to the Readme so everyone will read it or to someplace on the website itself or both. Whichever suites fine. I think it will be useful and good to have. Meanwhile, we can create an issue for asking already included projects at up-for-grabs for adding this tag to their projects if they want to. Not spamming but a script could be made also to automate this. Or could be done manually based on the individual doing it.

[m-murasovs]

This sounds like a great idea! I'm currently in the 'graduated from tutorials/not sure about projects' stage, so a guided contribution would be very welcome. I'll probably be past this stage by the time the feature is finished, but from the present point of view, I think it will go down well.

[shiftkey]

This new category could be given its own page on up-for-grabs, or maybe it could be a separate website altogether.

The more I think about this idea, the more I'd like to prominently display these within Up for Grabs itself - as a separate category alongside the project listing.

The issues tagged "guided contribution" would come with a guarantee that the person implementing them will be given high quality guidance from project maintainers. It's like an interactive lesson, targeted at people who are new to contributing. This presumes a high degree of involvement from the maintainers. The contributor is solving a real life issue, while being walked through it to some degree (enough so that they don't get stuck, but while remaining their own work).

Rather than a dedicated tag for these, I'd like to experiment with focusing on specific tasks to ensure this doesn't get abused and that we properly vet the tasks.

If someone wants to propose some tasks that they think would be a good fit for this, I'd be happy to figure out the criteria for this and propose how we incorporate it into the site.