Erm, "bitesized bugs", not "bitesized buts". What an embarrassing typo (but I guess it could have been worse.)

OpenHatch, a website I help run, exists to help people find ways they can contribute to free and open source software.

(It was covered on Slashdot a few weeks ago.)

We have a few things that you might like:

• The volunteer opportunity finder, a listing of free software projects' "bitesized" buts, organized by project, language, or type of help wanted (e.g. writing documentation). We index thousands of bugs from hundreds of projects.
• The "I want to help!" button, a way to express interest in helping a project even if you don't know what to do. For an example, check out the people who want to help GNU social.
• Project pages like Gally's, where existing contributors have written about what kind of help they want.

If you want to work on a project which has contributors in your area (maybe you want to get together for a hackathon, or to ask questions about how something in the code works), check out the ubiquitous People Map. You can see everyone on the site or browse by project or skill.

OpenHatch is itself free software, and we have a small and growing volunteer contributor base. (-:

Let us know what you do or don't like!

We are contacting project leads. I'm reaching out to my friends and the projects they're working on, and blogging about this stuff on Planet Debian (since I'm a Developer on Debian).

http://openhatch.org/wiki/Bug_trackers is where we ask that project leads write about their bug trackers so we can import them into openhatch.org/search/. We're trying to find more projects that label bugs as "bitesize."

On project pages, we're hoping that the people who add projects to their profiles follow the link and leave a note. Maybe we could nudge people with a bigger message, asking them to do that?

Money can reduce volunteer activity, crowding it out with a smaller pool of paid developers.

http://ideas.repec.org/p/prt/dpaper/3_2009.html is one of many papers on this topic.

(I'm asheesh at openhatch.org.)

Yeah, finding a bitesize bug that looks cool is a drag when the next step isn't clear.

It would be nice if more of these bitesize bugs were well-maintained by their projects, or at least you could tell what you should do next.

Something we could do is give you an info box, suggesting good next steps. "If there is a patch, download it -- does the patch apply against the current version of the software? Does it work? Does it seem like a good contribution? Patch review is very helpful to project leads."

What do you think? I'm really eager to hear others' ideas.

Keep in mind that, without your help, the patch might never land. So even if you "just" write, "This patch looks good!" or "This patch sucks; can someone delete it?" you're moving the issue closer to resolved.

This is why OpenHatch focuses on projects that have bitesize bugs.

There are projects that *want* new contributors, and they're marking tickets in their bug trackers as good for newcomers.

You can read more about that at https://openhatch.org/blog/2009/get-involved-in-foss/.

(It's 2am, and I'm going to sleep!)

Thanks for your thoughts on the site!

The project pages are actually generated from the list of projects people have said they contribute to. So it is all things that people on the site have worked on, in one way or another.

The point of our the project is to help people find the *official* channel to contribute, and I think having that information in another place can't hurt.

I really don't want the site to feel gross and astroturfy, since it's actually organic! So your feedback is helpful, if somewhat painful to hear. (-:

Oh, yeah, and our hosting is two little Linode virtual machines, so we do suffer a bit more than huge sites like Launchpad when a load storm comes our way. We're working on performance, too. (-:

-- asheesh at openhatch.org.

FCC is used, at least, in the Alpine (formerly known as PINE) mail reader to mean "Folder carbon copy".

That, and by a federal agency. Oh, now I get your comment...

If you're willing to break the CCC standard, you could mangle the "." in an email address. There are plenty of Unicode characters that look like a dot that aren't the real dot. That way, the reply-all to the CCC'd recipient would bounce.

Otherwise, well, um, see the Security considerations section.

Thanks for these comments. I agree with your general tone -- that it's great when hackers help people *unlike* themselves.

With regard to HTTP vs. HTTPS, you write that HTTPS adds "extra overhead." That's true in two ways -- TCP round-trips and CPU load. For CPU load, our server really can afford it. It's disk I/O that hurts us. As for the round-trips and their effect on latency, if the client does pipelining and stays on the site for a little while, that mostly goes away. So I think the worst thing HTTPS can do is drive away users who can't handle the extra round-trips for the first few page loads. That's a possible problem.

I don't want OpenHatch users' web traffic to be snoopable by their ISP or people using the same coffee-shop wifi connection. By keeping HTTPS on, I'm making life easier for those who value privacy. It's not as if it's really harder to use a HTTPS connection than HTTP one, so it's no burden (except the round-trips) on those who don't care about privacy. I'm heartened by big developer-oriented websites like Launchpad and Ohloh using HTTPS by default.

As for text-mode email clients, well, I use what I love. (-: I don't spend all that much time taking care of the Alpine source; mostly I fix Debian-related bugs for Debian/Ubuntu users who want to use it.

You can see from https://openhatch.org/people/paulproteus/ that I've hacked on projects with more visibility than that, like http://search.creativecommons.org/.

I try to keep OpenHatch responsive to user feedback. So do check out the site and send us email, or file a bug, or chat with us on #openhatch on irc.freenode.net!

HTTPS is a nicety for our users. End-to-end cryptography is a great thing; let's have more of it!

I happen to like alpine and text-mode email reading in general.

When you say this makes you wonder, do you just mean I'm clearly some sort of bizarro nutjob? (Nothing to wonder -- that one's probably true.) Or is there something specific you wonder? If so, say what it is, and I can possibly answer. (-: