Topic Proposal: Identify "clean up" tasks that could help new contributors to gain confidence

[Drawaes]

If you have never contributed to opensource before, but would like to, it is often a daunting task. I think it would be good to try to identify and breakdown a number of "nice to have but not critical" tasks, and if we can make sure that the heavy contributors and MS staff leave them alone (I know we are all OCD coders that will really want to scratch the itch)

The type of things I am thinking are....

1.. C# 7.0/7.xxx feature cleanup use on particular file areas
2.. Test coverage for areas that are known to be lacking ?

I can't think of anymore right now but still

They could be tagged and advertised. The "boost" of confidence you tend to get by actually getting your first PR committed can make a life long contributor, it also leads to people tweeting and getting excited.

Things like this (style, cosmetics etc) can be a heavily load to review, so maybe you could get "core" or experienced contributors to triage them first to catch simple stuff before an MS staffer spends time reviewing it....

Anyway just an idea, but as said once someone gets their first PR under their belt, their confidence grows and they tend to go on and help out.

[svick]

This sounds very similar to first-timers-only. As far as I can tell, no dotnet repo is currently using that label.

[karelz]

Note: It is on my radar and part of one of the proposed topic: #3 (comment):

• Marking issues (or announcing work as) first-time-contributor-only vs. easy vs. up-for-grabs vs. large project

[karelz]

I discussed it a bit at .NET Fringe conference with a few other OSS maintainers (incl. davglick who contributed to up-for-grabs). The idea is to try to ask up-for-grabs maintainers to extend the scope to have up to 3 columns per repo: fist-timers-only ("merge with existing site"), easy, general up-for-grabs.

Dave suggested it to the them in the past, but it didn't get much positive feedback. I plan to try it again. Community backing would help :)

[Drawaes]

I missed that comment in your original write up. That's good enough for me so I will close this.