Discussion (and potential setup) of ability to self-assign issues

[wkyoshida]

Terms

• [X] I have searched open and closed issues
• [X] I agree to follow activist's Code of Conduct

Issue

With the activist community growing and hacktoberfest in full-swing, I've been wondering about the ability for folks to potentially self-assign themselves to unassigned issues. Some reasons for this are:

• to free @andrewtavis from having to diligently moderate issues
• to give contributors a hopefully smoother/enjoyable contributing experience
• to give other contributors better up-to-date visibility on which issues are still up-for-grabs

Not sure if this is deemed a beneficial automation - so open to discussion :smile::speech_balloon: One idea, though, could be simply for a quick GitHub Action to listen for GitHub events of type issue_comment and trigger after a comment containing something like /assign me or /assign @wkyoshida (something similar to what is discussed here). Then, the Action could assign the user to the issue.

Other thoughts - we could make it so:

• this only works for still unassigned issues
• only one user per issue is assigned this way. Other users can still get assigned to the issue through the regular manual flow (this is important, for instance, during discussion issues where multiple people are involved as in #174)

Let me know :shrug:

[andrewtavis]

Definitely is an interesting question, @wkyoshida 🤔 If I'm being honest, I do kind of like the personal touch of assigning issues to non-collaborators so that we can do more of a personal welcome and make it clear that we're happy to help. The load on me will also decrease as the org has more members (😇🙃🙃). I think that we also should maybe expand it out a bit more as far as providing rights to contributors before we send org invites so they can pick up issues. This would certainly help?

Let me know what you think!

[wkyoshida]

I do kind of like the personal touch of assigning issues to non-collaborators so that we can do more of a personal welcome and make it clear that we're happy to help

Oh absolutely - that is definitely fair! :smile:

I guess - I am also just thinking that doing both is a possibility as well? The /assign * ability doesn't mean that core org members cannot also still make sure to hop in and write a welcome message + offer assistance :rocket:

Simply - I'm thinking the big thing is just giving the contributor a different experience**:

• As opposed to feeling that they need to ask for permission to contribute:
  • "Hey! New here. Love the project; is it ok if I help out with this issue?"
• Giving them the feeling that they can immediately hop in:
  • "Oh cool project - would love to help. Oh look an open issue; oh hell yeah; oh /assign me for sure"

** I might definitely be over-dramatizing this too much in my head and others may disagree :laughing: but you get the gist.

I think that we also should maybe expand it out a bit more as far as providing rights to contributors before we send org invites so they can pick up issues.

Sorry, maybe I'm getting caught up in the wording above - not sure if I caught exactly what you meant. Would you mind rephrasing it another way? Thanks in advance!

[andrewtavis]

What I mean on the rights is that maybe we've been a bit to slow on giving people triage rights. That could be an intermediate step before org membership that would then allow people to pick up an issue :)

It's also would be a signal for us as a community that this person might need to get upgraded as rather than them continuing to assign in the same way we'd see that they for some reason still can't assign themselves and we could do a quick internal discussion of hey I think XYZ should have triage at this point. Not sure though 🤔 I do very much like the idea of people having more agency about jumping in, and would expect that we'd still jump in and offer help. Getting an automated message with the assignment with some quick information might also be good, but let's not go over-automated and send an automated message with the assignment and then automatically assign someone to help them and then that person doesn't jump in and then we're not doing a good job.

[wkyoshida]

As discussed in the dev sync, I'll be looking into setting something up for this, but only for good first issues. I'll assign myself here manually :gear::upside_down_face: but I'll run tests on my fork.

... but let's not go over-automated and send an automated message with the assignment and then automatically assign someone to help them and then that person doesn't jump in and then we're not doing a good job.

Also, definitely agree with the above :laughing: but do let me know if there's a specific message you might have in mind that could be good. Initially, I was thinking some sort of welcome message with mention of Matrix could be a good candidate.

[andrewtavis]

All sounds great, @wkyoshida! Quick welcome and please join us on Matrix/dev channel on Matrix is the best place to ask for help would be perfect 😊