[Bluepojo]

Yeah the word "social" is not accurate, thanks for pointing that out. Githacking is about connecting developers to projects and surfacing accessible tasks to get involved in OSS. ie: I'm a developer looking to get involved in git development. Git is a very complex piece of software, so I have 2 options: dive in head first and hope for the best or find someone to help me choose a task to work on. Githacking takes the second route but removes the 'someone' from the equation.

It pulls data from repositories and issue trackers to make it easy to find projects with tasks you can do based on your preferences and confidence level.

[saurik]

Ok, this specific feature description makes a lot of sense (pulling data from issue trackers to find projects with tasks you can do). From having read the readwriteweb article I was left with this feeling of "but that's exactly what GitHub does".

Under the possibly totally incorrect assumption that that article is based on marketing copy from you, I will offer a key suggestion I learned on product differentiation once: you need to say things that your competitors aren't just going to claim applies to their products as well.

Example: "our shoes are comfortable" is going to be a really difficult campaign because every single company in that space is going to be claiming that. In this case, saying "social layer for GitHub" is incredibly confusing (even if it is theoretically accurate, as another responder just pointed out), as GitHub bills itself as "a social network for programming projects".

To bring it to this case, when I looked at the readwriteweb article, the general idea of "find people to work on your projects" seems to be exactly what people are already using GitHub for, so my response was "wait, wtf" rather than "oh, that's an interesting take".

In particular, I got here: "the ability to find and promote repositories, showcase developers' skills and repositories, as well as reward those who contribute", and I thought "this article could have been written a few years ago about the launch of GitHub: what are they actually doing here that GitHub isn't".

[Bluepojo]

Ah, yeah, I can see that. We're a group of 4 developers who started this project this past Friday so we're still hashing a lot of things out.

Hopefully we'll get the message across clearer the next time around, thanks for the notes. I'll keep them in mind when we get more attention in future.

[gwoo]

how does this compare to openhatch.org?

[Bluepojo]

OpenHatch does some things well: they have a place to store tasks that get people involved on a basic level, and they let you promote your projects. Githacking is built directly on GitHub, however, so we have tons of data about the projects without the maintainers having to keep it updated. We can tell if a project is active, what language it's written in, and what open issues are up without anyone touching the Githacking profile. Github's api is fantastic.

[bradoyler]

yes, introducing people to people they don't already know is "social". This is going to kill.