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]
@glyph Once upon a time I was on the dev team for a Community (the show) fan game called Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne. I vaguely remember doing physics and input mapping work, but it was a long time ago.
There was a lot of core work that couldn't be farmed out, but the cool thing about the game was how asset-heavy it was, and that those assets were mostly in accessible aesthetics. Want to add another playable character from the universe of the show? Copy an existing sprite sheet full of pixel art to treat as reference, and edit from there, in software that could be as basic as classic MS Paint! Between art, level design, music, and QA, there was so much you could do, without needing to know a variable from a vertex.
It also all depended on having stable formats for content to slot into, and guides for how to do it, although data format migrations were another thing we could farm out to volunteers if need be.
@glyph Obviously most people will look at their project and think this story isn't too applicable to their own situation. "I'm not making a pixel art game."
No, but you maybe underestimate the amount of multimedia you'd benefit from. Banners, badges, mascots, release theme songs (not just for OpenBSD!). TRANSLATIONS. If your program has text, and it probably does, there's a lot of languages in this world and your software could be more accessible in them than you could do yourself.
Speaking of accessibility, getting people with disabilities to use your software and review it from disabled perspectives is really valuable. It helps you shape your design in ways that can empower people who often get abandoned by computing.
And of course, testing in general. Every project benefits from this, especially stuff that aims to be cross-platform.
More media whimsy, accessibility, and stability. That's chair stacking.
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
