Hackathons/Suggesting projects

If we want to continue encouraging people to work on wishlist tasks (and I think it's a good idea, for several reasons), then I think we need to take this into consideration:

We spend months preparing Phabricator tasks. People say "yeah, I could work on T793XXX or T768XXX, maybe" and then a few months pass and they don't think too much about the tasks they looked at when they registered. So they get to the hackathon. There they have two choices:


 * They can find tasks in Phabricator, sign up with their username and hope someone might find them. If they don't know each other, this might require some time looking around for each other, they need to keep track of what's happening in that ticket and so on.


 * Or they can grab one the 25 persons who just enthusiastically presented a project. The benefit of working on it is fresh in their memories, they know what the person looks like and it's easy to just go up to them and say, hey, that sounds interesting, let me help out.

If one of the Phabricator tasks really caught their attention, they'll probably still go with it – we had plenty of work done on wishlist tasks. But if they're agnostic when it comes to what to work on, I think the wishlist tasks will stand a much better chance if we identify persons who would be willing to go up and present them as their project, to immediately give them a face and a person to grab. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 13:39, 10 May 2016 (UTC)