[Bluepojo]

That's only part of the picture. What if you know what project you want to work on, but don't know what exactly needs doing?

An example from my experience: before I started working on Rubygems' testing infrastructure, I wanted to contribute to Rails, but didn't know where to start. The Lighthouse tracker is a bit intimidating without anyone to point you in the right direction. If there was a place I could go and find small "get your feet wet" tasks to then get to a point where I can rewrite major components, then I would have started contributing much earlier in my career. The way I got into doing things for Rubygems was via a friend: I got a direct request to help with a new project for Rubygems. I didn't know what needed to be done so I never helped out previously.

Githacking wants to be what that friend was for me: a way to contribute with no friction on either the maintainer's side or the contributer's side and a clear starting place for getting involved in a new project.

Taking that a step further: a major part of the platform will be feature requests from companies that depend on the project, not unlike the bounties large open source projects put out from time to time on a bug or feature. Companies request a feature from a project, it gets implemented, the contributer gets paid the bounty.

[ubermajestix]

I like the bounty idea and it could be a way to monezite the app if you can get traction. Didn't mean to be harsh in my earlier comments I just hadn't gotten a good idea of what you guys were thinking of providing. Good luck!

[Bluepojo]

Didn't take it as harsh. I appreciate when people make me think about what I'm working on, so thanks. ;)