thinking a lot about the concept of "chair stacking" today, and its power in organizing online communities https://www.jonafato.com/2024/12/20/stacking-chairs
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but I am kind of drawing a blank on what this might look like in an open source project context. this is indubitably a failure of imagination, I'm just not used to thinking about this. the big challenge is that most of the "toil" I can think of in open source is administrative, which means very high-trust. security report triage, code review, editing YAML files which require core administrative credentials
so, open thread: where's the chair-stacking labor in your own open source projects, that might be farmed out to external low-trust volunteers? something that people are not taking as An Onboarding Task where you're treating them as an intern, but just some useful labor that will save the core team some time, allow the volunteer to meaningfully contribute with a very shallow learning curve, but maybe not make any major structural improvements?
@glyph the "Using their knowledge and curiosity to improve the project in other ways" section in https://harihareswara.net/posts/2017/how-to-teach-and-include-volunteers-who-write-poor-patches/ may be handy
[I'm sorry, I'm less attentive to your own specifications and others' replies than usual, am trying to finish something by a deadline]
Super Swing Districts was a project this year that provided a small group of volunteers a clear pile of chairs to stack https://superswingdistricts.org/2026/ and it was kind of shockingly powerful in terms of getting together to do something useful. My uncle did the analysis and that was more than half of the work, but this small group of volunteers got together and edited some HTML and that unlocked $26,000 of fundraising in crucial downballot swing races
I am trying to think about how to expand this to open source maintenance. "good first task" is a concept that has kind of fallen apart. these issues are extremely hard to find, hard to curate, now we have fucking clankers buzzing around constantly (clanking around?) sniping these tasks that might otherwise help a human start to develop some deeper understanding of a system. and they tend to dry up quickly unless someone is investing LOTS of effort
