Community Bot

This is home to an idea to build a bot that can help communities of users maintain Github projects in a communal manner with the aim of making them resistant to being abandoned and unmaintained.

Ideally it would reach a standard where it would become the preferred avenue for maitaining a project even for quite activity involved project owners.

Motivation

A large number of useful projects on Github end up unmaintained because their owners become busy with other things. This is very understandable but can be hard for the users of those projects. Whilst forking a project is easy on Github, there is a risk that the new fork will become unmaintained for the same reasons and it is hard work to become a recognised or preferred fork for a project without buy in from the original maintainer.

A solution to this is to move towards a community ownership model for projects. If one maintainer moves on then others can step in to keep the project moving forward and well maintained. To achieve true community ownership we need a consensus model for running the project. Pull requests & issues can be created by users but then voted on by the community.

An independent third party is required to moderate those votes. The hope of this project is to create a bot to do that.

Actions

• Fork a repository

  • Github API: Create a Fork

• Merge a pull request

  • Github API: Perform a merge

• Close a pull request

  • Github API: Update a Pull Request

• Close an issue

  • Github API: Edit an Issue

• Find new issues

  • Github API: List Issues for a Repository

• Read comments on an issue or pull request

  • Github API: List Comments on an Issue

• Create a comment on an issue or pull request

  • Github API: Create a Comment

Organisation

Projects should be forked under an organisation so that people who want to help the general 'community-bot' effort can join the organisation and have access to the repositories. If we fork under a user instead then admins would have to be individually added to each repository that is cloned which would be slow.

Pool of Ideas

• Support dictator. The original project owner should be able to automatically pass or veto any action requested of the bot.

• It should be easy to enable the bot for only particular tasks. Those tasks should be recorded somewhere. Might make sense to keep them in the project code but not likely as they are metadata not a part of the project.

• Need a way of identifying useful people who should be awarded voting rights so that the community can expand and evolve. A certain amount of activity which is supported by the current community

The bot must be able to:

• Be asked to fork a repository and carry out that fork. This is potentially best done by raising an issue on a repository owned by the bot which is used only for this purpose. Some kind of 'talk to me' repository.

• Merge branches with no conflicts.

• Run tasks on a machine

• Respond to tickets

• Identify and track github users.

• Add collaborators to projects.

Additionally:

• Actions that cannot by performed by a bot on the API can be added to a queue and performed by trusted users and admins.

• User should have per-project trust levels & maybe a global trust level or maybe per language or per field trust levels.

• Network of trust - users can recommend or declare trust in eachother. Declarations do not generate trust unless the recommender is trusted. You shouldn't be able to create fake acconts in order to achieve a trusted status.

• Have a 'piller of the community' status for trusted known developers. eg. Kenneth Reitz in Python or Yehuda Katz in Ruby or similar roles. Voted for by the community.

• User can create pull requests. All users can vote on pull requests with defferent outcomes:

  • merge
  • reject
  • refactor

• Nominate maintainers & collaborators.

• Nominate dictators - dictatorship is revoked after a period of inactivity. Based on the idea that the ideal project lead is a active benevolent dictator who can provide direction rather than a community which might be divided in its goals.

• Vote to close issues

• Vote on wiki contributions or disable the wiki?

• Automatically generate a linked project itmeline or history on a separate 'community-bot.com' site under the approach github address.

• Vote on tagging commits. Vote on doing releases via packaging tools.

• Most obvious issue is how to build the initial community of trusted people for a new project. Long term we should have a good web of trust but initially it will be hard.

• Ask original maintainers to get involved and suggest trust levels for certain people.

• Have admins step in and seed the community.

• Automatically generate a list of users & their participation levels for admins to choose from.

• Syntax for:

  • voting
  • tagging
  • releasing

• Rely on github for logins & user management.

• Record information about people who aren't registered yet so we know how to teat them when they do.

Problems

• Name Clashes: It is possible that there is more than one project out there with the same name but in different fields. The names would clash if brought under one user or organisation. As such we might need to support renaming the clone in the 'ask for a clone' syntax.

  This seems to be possible via the API but as a separate command which would be a problem as we won't be able to fork first before renaming, I doubt.

Bootstrap

Ideally this concept would exist as a service which is hosted and works in real time but involves committing funds at an early stage. Before that point:

• Actions can be carried out be trusted admins using the Github interface.
• Actions can be coded up and run manually once a day to look at all new activity and respond as needed.

Services

Ideally the bot should be able to interact with any service that is needed in the management of the project. It should be possible to request and then vote on different actions by the bot.

• Github
• PyPI
• rubygems.org
• npmjs.com