Anyone know of a web hub designed specifically for collaboration on open source js/css projects?
A place designed to share code, and post improvements to other people’s code. Something like github, but more collaborative and user-friendly.
Not just a forum, but really designed to collaborate on code.
Thx!
What you’ve just described is github, while saying ‘more collaborative and user friendly’.
You’re going to have to define those phrases.
Something like github, but more collaborative and user-friendly.
I’m not sure how you’re going to get more collaborative and user-friendly than Github. By an extremely wide margin it’s the leader in this space.
But there is also Gitlab and Bitbucket. Both have much more confusing UI’s and much smaller communities. Generally if I find an open source project that doesn’t use Github, I pretty much just close it and find something else.
I want to post my CSS widget someplace, and easily attract other coders who want to improve it. Something with stronger social features. Like, “Join the dev team for this project” and “Post and discuss a new improvement”. Chat, messaging, profiles for devs to post their credentials, a search engine whereby coders seeking projects to work on can search for and join projects who are actively seeking collaborators, a built-in marketplace to share finished projects to the world. social features. Like, “Join the dev team for this project” and “Post and discuss a new improvement”.
Glitch sounded promising: "If your motivation for using an online IDE is to facilitate the creation and sharing of code with others, as part of a learning and community building process, then Glitch is the way to go. Glitch is a community-oriented programming and hosting platform where everybody can create, share and reuse projects from others. "
but their site looks designed for kids, and their IDE demo displays an error message.
Maybe github is the place! It’s likely that i simply don’t understand how to use it. i don’t know why github has always seemed a bit unapproachable to me. Understanding the github workflow and process has always been a struggle, but that’s just me.
Github doesn’t seem designed to encourage people searching and joining projects of interest. Collaboration between strangers. As in, “I built an open-source CSS widget, and looking for collaborators to join the team.”
The GitHub search screen seems to be a symptom of the problem. Search results only show 10 projects at a time (of tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of projects). So it’s really hard to see lots of results at a glance. Imo, that discourages collaboration.
I don’t see any flag like “projects seeking collaborators” or “collaborators seeking projects to work on”. That’s the sort of thing i’m looking for. A system with rich tools to promote projects.
How do you find them?
Github doesn’t seem designed to encourage people searching and joining projects of interest.
I agree. Their on site discovery is not the best, but I’m also not sure what they could do better. Most of the projects I find and star come from Reddit, Hacker News, random blogs, or just looking for a library on Google.
Github doesn’t seem designed to encourage people searching and joining projects of interest.
It absolutely is. You can make issues or fork anything public. Most popular projects have documents on how to contribute.
As in, “I built an open-source CSS widget, and looking for collaborators to join the team.”
It doesn’t have this. There are millions and millions of projects. Github is just a tool. Random people aren’t going to contribute to your project unless they already find it useful. You need to market it’s usefulness on different ways. I think discovery could be better on GitHub, but it wouldn’t really solve your problem. Your projects will just get lost in millions of others.
It actually does provide some means to encourage contributions via labels – see the docs here and here. There are also a couple of curated lists for people searching opportunities to contribute, for example this one (being itself community-driven). But yeah this may not be github’s primary concern.
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