Help Wanted: The contribution docs should make it clear that the contributor should explicitly claim the ticket

[mickmister]

There was recently a case where a contributor expressed interest in a ticket by asking questions for clarification, and it was pretty obvious that they wanted to work on the ticket, but I didn't assign them to the ticket since they didn't claim it. Soon afterwards, someone else submitted a PR and simultaneously claimed the ticket, without asking if they can work on it.

There are two important pieces here:

• The contribution docs should state that the ticket should be claimed if you have desire to work on the ticket.
• We should be proactive about asking to assign the ticket to the contributor if they have expressed interest, or 0/5 even assign them preemptively before they explicitly claim the ticket.

[justinegeffen]

I agree with this suggestion. @mickmister, we have quite a few instances of "Contribute to Mattermost" pages and sections. Do you have a specific page in mind for this change? This is where we point contributors from the Handbook: https://developers.mattermost.com/contribute/getting-started/. Happy to add more explicit steps to the Handbook page as well.

[mickmister]

@BenLloydPearson do you have any ideas on where to include this change? We definitely want this front and center for new contributors.

[BenLloydPearson]

@mickmister The Get Started page is probably the best place for this now, specifically, we could add sentence to this line that indicates that contributors should make sure the issue is assigned to them.

[Rutam21]

@cwarnermm I would like to take this up. I am thinking of including it somewhere on this page https://developers.mattermost.com/contribute/more-info/getting-started/contribution-checklist/. Please let me know if you think some other page would be a better fit. Thanks.

[cwarnermm]

Thank you, @Rutam21! I agree with your approach.