Highlighting issues to the wider technical community for input

GovStack welcomes and encourages the voices of all in the creation of its specification documents.

Sometimes, the leads of building blocks, or committees coordinating them, do not know all the possible ways in which an issue can be resolved or what content would be best in the documentation we produce. We wish to ask the wider technical community for help.

Highlighting an issue

To highlight an issue for consideration by the wider technical community, we need to label it as a “Good First Issue” that the technical community may want to engage with GovStack around. This is a widely used term across many opensource projects and will have a known meaning within that community.

Labelling a issue as a “Good First Issue” takes a number of steps for a Building Block lead to take:

1. Ensure that the issue contains enough information to enable someone to begin work, or at least ask relevant questions in the issue comments. A good issue would normally contain:

   1. Xxx

   2. Xxx

   3. Xxx

   4. Xxx

2. Add the label “GoodFirstIssue” to the issue

3. We will automatically display the list of issues containing this label on the GovStack.global website’s Join the Community page

4. Contact GovStack Communications Team who can arrange for social media to highlight the issue on your behalf

   1. If you can amplify the issue using your own social media, please do so!

5. Be ready to respond to comments on the issue

   1. Make people feel welcome - thank them for their comments, even if not apparently initially helpful. This may be their first interaction with the project

   2. Find out more about them and what made them interact - help them to navigate their way around as this may be their first issue of thousands