On the web, people can work when miles apart, even when not knowing each other in person.
On GitHub, the platform is certainly giving the advantages to those who want to work on open source projects. But that advantage can have a drawbacks, one of which, is the way these people collaborate.
When maintaining an open source project, developers can add a “help wanted” or “good first issue” label, which aims to send the message to the community that an issue is ready for them for the taking. But what happens when some enthusiastic contributors say that they'd to work on it?
How can the developer of the project send a clear signal to the rest of the community to say that they’d like a particular contributor to take it on, but without alienating others or following up with multiple comments themselves?
GitHub here is trying to solve this particular issue.
With an update, developers can assign any read-only contributor to issues they’ve commented on.
Chosen contributors will get a notification that they are assigned.
But if they can't take the task for whatever reasons, they can simply click on the “Unassign me” button next to their username. This is the option to easily inform the community that they're away, or won't be responding to issues as quickly.
Users can find this feature on their GitHub profile, and choose from options like "On vacation", "Working from home", "Out sick", and "Focusing". They can also set it to "Busy".
"We hope this new feature takes the friction out of assigning willing contributors to your issues fast—and helps you create a more welcoming open source community," said GitHub announcing the feature.
"We can’t wait to see what you build together."
Many users reacted positively to this feature, and also suggested further improvements.
For example, some suggestions include GitHub in making this status to have read/written from a canonical source, use LDAP protocol for synchronization across apps, and also creating a similar feature per-repo.
Some negative comments include those saying that GitHub is trying to become a social media itself.
In 2019, GitHub has undergone numerous updates that include unlimited free private repositories (GitHub Free) and a unified enterprise offering (GitHub Enterprise). Previously, it also added a Star button using where developers can use to indicate the topics they are interested in so GitHub can fetch the code and developers that share their interests.