Have you considered a top-level post, possibly by you but even better by Matt from Tricycle, saying:
“Hello! I am the official contact for Less Wrong administration. If you have something you want to code for the site, message me and I will tell you whether you have official permission and whether it will get added when you are done. The answer is probably yes.
Here is the language you should code in, the standards you should follow, and so on. Here’s where you can find the rest of the open-source code to see what you should be integrating it with. And here is the process to get your code running and up on the site when it is done, even if that process is just “email it to me”.
In the comments to this post, please discuss your programming projects for Less Wrong, check that they’re community-supported, and recruit people to help with them. If you can’t program, this would also be a good place to suggest projects and recruit people who can.”
Then stick a permalink to it similar to the “About” link going to Eliezer’s first explanatory post.
All this information is sort of available right now, but not in one place and not with explicit permission to work on things, so the trivial inconveniences add up.
In my humble opinion the population of those who will follow through with site improvements is small enough that that link doesn’t deserve a very prominent position. It’s linked from the About page (and better linked now than it was a few mins ago).
One of the things that holds new contributors back is that the original Reddit code… is really ugly and isn’t covered by unit tests. We’ve (Trike) poked it forwards but never taken the (huge amount of) time required to make it into a clean codebase. That’s going to make it hard for inexperienced programmers to contribute inside the capacity of their goodwill reservoirs.
Those goodwill reservoirs are a challenge in most open source development, too. Posts to open source lists that start “tonight I will…” are much more common than posts that start “last night I…”. Collecting intentions to work on features sounds useful, but unless it’s followed up by hounding it’s a thankless task (and hounding is a thankless task).
This wasn’t a very constructive comment. Sorry about that.
Nitpick: We (Trike) fund our own work, but act strictly on Eliezer’s authority—I don’t consider myself to have the authority to grant official permission for anything. I sometimes presume to guess at what Eliezer will authorise and act before he grants permission, but only when my confidence is high.
I commit to working on modifying the code to organize meetups in a way that makes more sense, if someone else is able to provide direction and authority. I haven’t worked on the code before, and I can’t promise anything except that I will attempt to work on it.
I have just read the github wiki. I will try to get an instance of the site running. What’s the next step after that? Who else should I be coordinating with?
KenChen—kudos to you for publicly making this commitment. Unfortunately for you you’re a member of reference class “low site karma people I don’t know”. The next step is to follow through with your commitment. Please let me know when you’ve successfully made the code run on your machine, and made even a trivial change to the site (that worked on your local machine).
Have you considered a top-level post, possibly by you but even better by Matt from Tricycle, saying:
“Hello! I am the official contact for Less Wrong administration. If you have something you want to code for the site, message me and I will tell you whether you have official permission and whether it will get added when you are done. The answer is probably yes.
Here is the language you should code in, the standards you should follow, and so on. Here’s where you can find the rest of the open-source code to see what you should be integrating it with. And here is the process to get your code running and up on the site when it is done, even if that process is just “email it to me”.
In the comments to this post, please discuss your programming projects for Less Wrong, check that they’re community-supported, and recruit people to help with them. If you can’t program, this would also be a good place to suggest projects and recruit people who can.”
Then stick a permalink to it similar to the “About” link going to Eliezer’s first explanatory post.
All this information is sort of available right now, but not in one place and not with explicit permission to work on things, so the trivial inconveniences add up.
We’d tried to make that stuff clear from https://github.com/tricycle/lesswrong/wiki
[sad face]
In my humble opinion the population of those who will follow through with site improvements is small enough that that link doesn’t deserve a very prominent position. It’s linked from the About page (and better linked now than it was a few mins ago).
One of the things that holds new contributors back is that the original Reddit code… is really ugly and isn’t covered by unit tests. We’ve (Trike) poked it forwards but never taken the (huge amount of) time required to make it into a clean codebase. That’s going to make it hard for inexperienced programmers to contribute inside the capacity of their goodwill reservoirs.
Those goodwill reservoirs are a challenge in most open source development, too. Posts to open source lists that start “tonight I will…” are much more common than posts that start “last night I…”. Collecting intentions to work on features sounds useful, but unless it’s followed up by hounding it’s a thankless task (and hounding is a thankless task).
This wasn’t a very constructive comment. Sorry about that.
Nitpick: We (Trike) fund our own work, but act strictly on Eliezer’s authority—I don’t consider myself to have the authority to grant official permission for anything. I sometimes presume to guess at what Eliezer will authorise and act before he grants permission, but only when my confidence is high.
I commit to working on modifying the code to organize meetups in a way that makes more sense, if someone else is able to provide direction and authority. I haven’t worked on the code before, and I can’t promise anything except that I will attempt to work on it.
I have just read the github wiki. I will try to get an instance of the site running. What’s the next step after that? Who else should I be coordinating with?
KenChen—kudos to you for publicly making this commitment.
Unfortunately for you you’re a member of reference class “low site karma people I don’t know”. The next step is to follow through with your commitment. Please let me know when you’ve successfully made the code run on your machine, and made even a trivial change to the site (that worked on your local machine).
Thank you. The world needs more of those. (For what class I mean by “those” see here.)