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.
Yes, we just had some site problems; they seem fixed now, and additionally, I pushed a front page redesign some contributors had been working on for the past month! : D
(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!
For those interested in the technical details, here are some changes we made to better-handle the traffic spike:
* 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.
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.
This is excellent, particularly the mentoring aspect of it. There is some really nice work to do in iPython and with Mozilla. Given the heavy Mozilla involvement I'm surprised they haven't gone with openbadges.
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.
Oh, also, w/r/t OpenBadges, we haven't gotten around to it, but are vaguely enthusiastic.
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.
This is a great initiative. I wish there was a site that could match designers or UX people with open source projects. I am surprised that something like this doesn't exist. Are these two camps a little bit weary or suspicious of each other?
A good article - thanks for the link. I think user testing is an essential part of making software more usable, but it's not the only aspect of the design process.
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.
Perhaps consider changing that font (Tuffy) to something that renders half-decently on Windows. It's just an eyesore in Firefox and Chrome. It does look OK on Linux though.
If Tuffy doesn't look good on OS X or Windows, then we should look into switching to something that is readable and nice to look at. Thanks for saying so!
It would be really nice to be able to log in with github, since many project owners already have a github account.