Ask Slashdot: Where to Host Many Small, Related Projects? 69
MellowTigger writes "I work at a non-profit organization. I am looking for a site where we can register an account under our group's name, then spawn multiple projects to solicit programmer help for our organization. The current projects that we have in mind are small and probably not of interest to the wider world, although one very large project is possible. I need a site that emphasizes our non-profit as the benefactor rather than the wider world, since most projects are so specific that wider applicability seems slim. We would need help with various technologies including at least Powershell and SQL. At the moment, my available options emphasize individual projects of public interest, so we would have to spawn multiple independent projects, seeming to spam the host with 'pointless' minor tasks. We already have technical people seeking to donate time. We just need a way to coordinate skill matching, document sharing, and code submission out on the web. What do you suggest?"
soliciting programmer support - a pipe dream? (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope that the OP doesn't expect programmers to flock to support his project, just because it is present on a social coding site.
They won't. Probably not a single one. Even if he uses the most popular host providing such services, GitHub.
For the most part, there is no contribution whatsoever, unless the contributor has some stake. The most successful GitHub projects are those that have some kind of corporate sponsorship, and you have several big companies contributing one or more full-time employees to the project.
Beyond that, you might get some contribution to the project if a lot of people are using it, and some of them modify it to suit their own needs, and either they altruisticlly contribute their modifications back(not common), or (more commonly) by contributing back they absolve themselves of having to maintain their own separate fork.
For projects with, say, 100-200 watchers (which probably means 10X that many users), it's typical to get maybe a pull request or two per year.
So, hopefully the OP has some volunteers lined-up already, or knows where to find them. They aren't going to appear out of nowhere.
I think it would be silly to set-up your own server for this. GitHub is the goto place today. It has a good-enough Issues system that is well integrated with code management, and makes it easy to publish documentation.
Ask your own technical people! (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you considered asking whatever the "people seeking to donate time" say they use for source hosting and going with whatever the majority loves doing?