Giving OpenHatch a try

A few days ago I came across some news about OpenHatch and discovered this non-profit that aims at helping would-be open-source contributors to find projects to contribute too.

I must say that I find this idea really nice. Of course that's yet another open-source project directory coming after sourceforge, github, ohloh etc but what I like here is that they also  try to formalize a way to define entry points for beginners (with specific tags on issues and a small pre-formatted FAQ).

So I decided to give it a try and see if I can attract would-be contributors to some of my projects, especially wateronmars, yapsy and shivasmiles. I expect that for all of these projects there is still a long way to go to make them perfectly welcoming to beginners, but the first step is done and we'll see if we can do something out of that.

Another reason I like this "openhatch" idea is that in my actual job, when I interview people to hire, the ones that have contributed significantly to open source projects usually stand out. It's far from being a strict selection criteria of course but usually a good sign anyway.