Since I registered my project on Up For Grabs, I get a lot of novice volunteers, which is great as I like both the ideas of 1) improving the app 2) introducing novices to open source collaboration.
But I have a management+social+technical problem, illustrated by this example today:
As you can see, one after the other, 3 volunteers have taken the issue under their responsibility then become silent, with a month's interval between each.
- They are volunteer novices, so the problem is not them. I fully expect that they might give up, and hold no grudge against them.
- On the technical side, GitHub is not helping, as I can not assign an issue to someone who is not a member of the project. And I don't think making them a GitHub project member is a good idea at this step (or is it?). I created the "assigned" label to work around this problem, but it is not optimal as it does not say to whom the issue is assigned. I want to continue to use GitHub for issue tracking, though, as it has become a de facto standard.
- I hesitate between spending more time spoonfeeding newcomers, or spending less time so that I dedicate my time to other aspects of the project.
- Before we had a policy of "First pull request wins", that lead to frustration as we had some real cases of novices posting nearly the same pull request at the same time for something non-trivial that they that obviously had dedicated a lot of time to. Not a pleasant situation, and a very traumatic first experience for some of them, which is something I really want to avoid.
How can I improve my handling of the situation? Be it via behavior, project guidelines, technical solutions, or anything else.