Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] volunteering

[Michael J. Flickinger]

Hi,

Thanks for your interesting in helping out. :)

On 1/28/12 6:53 AM, Brandon Invergo wrote:
> Hello Savannah Hackers,
>
> I've been wanting to help out with the GNU project for a while now but
> I've been unsure of where to help. I assume that Savannah still needs
> help, despite the resurrection back in November. Of course, I understand
> that this would mostly entail reviewing project submissions, so, as
> instructed, I've included what my response to a submission (#11765
> CDEsql) below.

The review looks fine.  For future reference, we have two scripts to 
assist with project review "response crafting."

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/administration.git/tree/approvals

One for emacs and one for vim.

> However, what I would be more interested in doing, if you guys approve,
> would be to help clean out old, inactive things. In particular, the Help
> Wanted area has posts going back a decade. I think it's safe to assume
> that many of those requests may be considered closed and removed at this
> point. Another, possibly touchier subject, would be to flag old,
> inactive and incomplete projects for removal. For both cases, I've
> written a suggested protocol below.

Let's focus on the help wanted area.  There's already a support request, 
https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?106581, which we can use to discuss 
the issue (feel free to post your ideas there).

I agree, having open "help wanted" items from 2001 just isn't helpful.

> This isn't so much about space, which I'm sure isn't a huge problem.
> It's that, for me, as a visitor to Savannah, when I saw the Help Wanted
> area full of old posts and many of the projects apparently abandoned, it
> made the site feel a bit stale or inactive. I think cleaning out some of
> the cobwebs wouldn't hurt...

> This would require a lot more care and attention. First of all, only
> projects which have been inactive for at least X years (3? 5?) would be
> considered. In all cases, the project would not be immediately deleted.
> Instead, it would be flagged for review by another admin, and then we
> would attempt to contact the project owner to verify that the project is
> abandoned. It's important not to be overly zealous with this since even
> inactive projects can be of value to people starting new projects.
>
> Some rules for deciding to flag a project for removal (again, only after
> it's been inactive for X years):
> - no source code has been uploaded
> - it's determined that project activity is occurring on a different
> hosting service
> - development status<  2(?)

That's an interesting idea.  Some projects only use Savannah for 
webhosting though, so they have no uploaded code.  I think it's better 
to focus on cleaning up the old "help wanted" posts first.

What's your username on Savannah, is it brandon?