Hi everyone,
I'm Dave, a Google Summer of Code student working with OpenHatch. I'm part of the Greenhouse development team along with Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org> and Asheesh Laroia <paulproteus@debian.org>. We are working on a project called Greenhouse to track new open source contributors. The basic premise is that there are stages from when someone shows up in an open source community to becoming a full fledged maintainer. For example, Judy might show up to file a bug or request a feature, end up contributing documentation, decide to submit a patch, and then finally become a project maintainer. Many people drop out of the pipeline in the earlier stages before reaching the end and becoming a full maintainer. Greenhouse is meant to track new contributors through the pipeline and help them reach the end. The code is based on Ubuntu's Developer Advisory Team (https://launchpad.net/dat-overview). For those concerned about privacy, we only aggregate publicly available data, and the tool is currently private to the Greenhouse development team and Debian developers who ask for permission.
Your help is critical at this point! For our initial prototype we are tailoring the system to the Debian community. We are looking for Debian mentors to give us feedback on the UI and what features would be helpful to this process. If there is a particular workflow you like or a feature you need, this is the point in time where it is most likely to make it into the project!
The best way to help and/or request features it to introduce yourself on on our mailing list at http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/greenhouse and join the discussion. I will also join #debian-mentors and #debian-qa and be reachable there, but the best way to reach me is my nickname daveeloo at #openhatch on freenode or email me at daveeloo@gmail.com.