[TWN team] Suggestion for new TWN section: easy development tasks to get involved

[Karsten Loesing]

Hello news-team,

I briefly discussed this with Lunar on tor-assistants@, but he suggested
moving the discussion here.

>From my earlier mail on that other thread:
> the "News from Tor StackExchange" section that qbi writes for TWN made
> me think whether there could be a similar section that highlights some
> easy development tasks and asks TWN readers to help out.
> 
> These development tasks should be fairly simple and not take more than a
> few hours for a new volunteer.  They should also not take much less
> time, or we should rather do them ourselves.
> 
> The main goal would be to get new volunteers interested in hacking on
> Tor stuff.  Another goal would be to resolve some of the more than 3K
> open tickets.  Could be that we'll close some of them by looking for
> suitable tickets for TWN.
> 
> How about we try the following for a few TWN issues: I go through open
> Trac tickets, seemingly at random, and pick two or three tasks.  I
> describe them in a paragraph, talk to ticket owners if they'd want to
> accept patches (which is not obvious, because maybe they don't care
> about the ticket anymore), and then put paragraphs on TWN.
> 
> I started doing this below.  Nick, Damian, what do you think about the
> little-t-tor and stem tickets for TWN?  Feel free to suggest different
> tasks (please provide a new paragraph in that case), or let me know if
> you think this approach doesn't make much sense for you.

Lunar created a wiki page for collecting tickets here:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorWeeklyNews/BugsToPlug

He also offered help with this new section, which is great.  In fact, if
anybody else wants to help, please do!  Just keep in mind that we
shouldn't include a ticket without talking to the ticket/component owner.

Lunar also mentioned that TWN is sometimes too long to include this new
section.  This is fine.  We shouldn't include tickets that are that
urgent that they couldn't spend another week in the queue.

Everyone, keep on doing the great work for TWN!  It's really important!

All the best,
Karsten