That was my first thought too, but I bet the pull request approach is really hard to spam. As I get more and more quasi work-related spam emails, that looks more and more appealing.
In the intended workflow, the PR itself is a very small part of the process. You fork the repo, study it, analyze it, work on it, test it, ..etc (99% of time spent), you create pull request (1%). Plus there is a reason for the PR - you describe your changes, provide reasoning for them, allow many parties to review them.
With the concert request there is nothing to do, just create the request with specific data (something that would work MUCH better through a web form) and there is no reason to have it public as only relevant people to comment are you and the band's manager (something that would work well through email).
Sorry, semi rhetorical question. Still, there's no easy way to do a quick PR on GitHub. That might be intentional. I suspect it's also intentional on the part of the band—they say if you do a proper PR it's very possible that they'll agree, so it's a kind of proof of work.
The only band I know you can book via GitHub pull request - Raw Funk Maharishi. They've got data focused blog too. Amazing
http://rawfunkmaharishi.uk/blog/
Tangent: I really like the idea of a calendar backed by git, submit a patch / pull request for some of my time. Everyone can see your master branch, maybe a branch for private events.
You know, backed by git, don't expose even the porcelain commands.
So neat, but wow is that not the best way of doing something. It's good publicity, but you immediately cut the amount of people who can contact you down to just programmers. Much better to have a basic site with a phone number, email and contact form.
I wrote that and then googled them, to see what they had (http://rawfunkmaharishi.uk/book-the-band/). Once again, asking to be contacted through facebook and twitter isn't really ideal, a contact form would be a welcome addition to this page.
Have you considered that cutting the amount of people who can contact them might be the point? It's like those job ads hidden in the HTML of websites - you reduce the population but increase the signal-to-noise ratio.
I hadn't, but I'd be surprised if that were the case. Usually bands want to get as many fans and gigs and as much publicity as they can. It seems odd that they would only want programmers as fans, unless they were especially pretentious.
It's a gig band. They play bars and clubs for whatever money they can get from cover charges. Limiting the number of places that can book you is dumb. Plus, its not like they have to book everyone that requests them.
It's the "Anti-Pattern Tour", with "Inappropriate Metaphor" being joined on stage by the techno-rock band "Impedance Mismatch", followed by the soulful sounds of "Leaky Abstraction".
"I hope they play their old stuff like 'You Ain't Gonna Need It", and 'Now You Have Two Problems'. Their new album, 'Second-Systems Syndrome', took forever to be released, and doesn't have the same simple sounds".
