> Flowers recommends building a community on a chat platform like Discord, Gitter, or Slack to make it easier for people to get involved informally with a project. “It makes people feel less hesitant to ask quick questions,” she said. “A lot of people are intimidated to ask questions on repositories.”
I have asked questions on repositories, more times than I have fingers. I have created pull requests that fix problems I've had, fewer times than I have fingers. I can think of twice those have yielded positive results: one time I received a clear answer to a question which solved my problem; another time a pull request was rejected with an explanation. (It was a fair enough reason: my change would have broken a different use-case I hadn't considered. I used my code fix locally - on a personal project - until I stopped needing that project.)
Far, far, far more often than that I have seen my questions already asked, or pull requests already created, with no answer or merge forthcoming. I'm not intimidated by the process, but have come to think of it (on GitHub, at least) as fairly pointless, and it's been ages since I've bothered. (I've also come to avoid using GitHub projects with a single developer, and /or without a really active and recent update history.)
I understand why "I've made the code public; I don't owe anyone anything else; fork it if you don't like it" is a prevailing attitude amongst GitHub project creators. I also think it obviates the original premise of GitHub - to create collaborative communities of developers and users - to the platform's detriment. It's not surprising (but still disappointing) that people are looking to other platforms for the community-development (in both senses) that GitHub could, and was intended to, support.
GitHub has probably been more successful than any platform at connecting developers, but I think it is ultimately subject to the same limitation as the big social media platforms in that regard: if you are connected with everyone, you aren't really connected with anyone. When someone creates an issue or pull request on your repo, you have no idea about their competence or their intentions. You have no idea if they are trying to sneak in malicious code, or if they are trolling you, or are going to get offended if you suggest changes to their PR, or if they will have the capacity to understand your detailed technical response to their query. In a word, there is no trust. So if it's a side project (maybe one of many) it's often easier to just ignore contributions and treat GitHub as a way to publicly host your code on a "take it or leave it" basis.
For true collaboration, maybe other, smaller forges where developers are more likely to have something in common would be more useful.
> Flowers recommends building a community on a chat platform like Discord, Gitter, or Slack to make it easier for people to get involved informally with a project.
Sample size n = 1, but I saw a lot more engagement on my projects when I was hosting mattermost helpdesks for people to join and ask their questions. Unfortunately I had to shut them down because turns out having random individuals ping you on your phone about an issue that is well documented gets very draining.
Honestly, public forums, stackexchange, etc also have a huge benefit over something like discord/gitter/slack, in that previously asked questions are indexed by Google -- which is often the first recourse of someone trying to figure something out. If the discussion is sequestered behind an authentication gate, it can't help other folks out down the road.
I have asked questions on repositories, more times than I have fingers. I have created pull requests that fix problems I've had, fewer times than I have fingers. I can think of twice those have yielded positive results: one time I received a clear answer to a question which solved my problem; another time a pull request was rejected with an explanation. (It was a fair enough reason: my change would have broken a different use-case I hadn't considered. I used my code fix locally - on a personal project - until I stopped needing that project.)
Far, far, far more often than that I have seen my questions already asked, or pull requests already created, with no answer or merge forthcoming. I'm not intimidated by the process, but have come to think of it (on GitHub, at least) as fairly pointless, and it's been ages since I've bothered. (I've also come to avoid using GitHub projects with a single developer, and /or without a really active and recent update history.)
I understand why "I've made the code public; I don't owe anyone anything else; fork it if you don't like it" is a prevailing attitude amongst GitHub project creators. I also think it obviates the original premise of GitHub - to create collaborative communities of developers and users - to the platform's detriment. It's not surprising (but still disappointing) that people are looking to other platforms for the community-development (in both senses) that GitHub could, and was intended to, support.