Bluepojo
Bluepojo on Hacker News
Didn't take it as harsh. I appreciate when people make me think about what I'm working on, so thanks. ;)
OpenHatch does some things well: they have a place to store tasks that get people involved on a basic level, and they let you promote your projects. Githacking is built directly on GitHub, however, so we have tons of data about the projects without the maintainers having to keep it updated. We can tell if a project is active, what language it's written in, and what open issues are up without anyone touching the Githacking profile. Github's api is fantastic.
That's only part of the picture. What if you know what project you want to work on, but don't know what exactly needs doing?
An example from my experience: before I started working on Rubygems' testing infrastructure, I wanted to contribute to Rails, but didn't know where to start. The Lighthouse tracker is a bit intimidating without anyone to point you in the right direction. If there was a place I could go and find small "get your feet wet" tasks to then get to a point where I can rewrite major components, then I would have started contributing much earlier in my career. The way I got into doing things for Rubygems was via a friend: I got a direct request to help with a new project for Rubygems. I didn't know what needed to be done so I never helped out previously.
Githacking wants to be what that friend was for me: a way to contribute with no friction on either the maintainer's side or the contributer's side and a clear starting place for getting involved in a new project.
Taking that a step further: a major part of the platform will be feature requests from companies that depend on the project, not unlike the bounties large open source projects put out from time to time on a bug or feature. Companies request a feature from a project, it gets implemented, the contributer gets paid the bounty.
Ah, yeah, I can see that. We're a group of 4 developers who started this project this past Friday so we're still hashing a lot of things out.
Hopefully we'll get the message across clearer the next time around, thanks for the notes. I'll keep them in mind when we get more attention in future.
Yeah the word "social" is not accurate, thanks for pointing that out. Githacking is about connecting developers to projects and surfacing accessible tasks to get involved in OSS. ie: I'm a developer looking to get involved in git development. Git is a very complex piece of software, so I have 2 options: dive in head first and hope for the best or find someone to help me choose a task to work on. Githacking takes the second route but removes the 'someone' from the equation.
It pulls data from repositories and issue trackers to make it easy to find projects with tasks you can do based on your preferences and confidence level.
The paid platform will be a bit more involved to get working, for sure. Right now we're focusing on getting this useful for open source projects to find collaborators then we'll worry about making it useful for companies.
I always called it Model View Controller... MVC