Broadcasting a "can you help review x?"

[Beanow]

This is a cool suggestion from @vsoch here #1 (comment)
Moving to it's own thread here.

@vsoch
Since we have various platforms for discussion, it might be useful here to suggest a standard way to alert people on those platforms that "Hey this PR needs some love!"

@BrianLitwin
This is a really good idea point_up . New contributors will probably have less confidence communicating with folks, and err on the side of being less assertive in communicating the state of their requests. It's easy to feel naggy when you're requesting somebodies time/attention.

@vsoch
To some extent we can also automate this with actions, given that platforms involved have APIs / programmatic access.

[Beanow]

I particularly feel @BrianLitwin's point here. Not knowing who might be interested in helping to review, or not wanting to bother people by pinging them. It's nice to have something in place to overcome that.

Normally I think this ends up on the maintainers' plate. PRs without an explicit request for review from anyone, depends on them noticing and chiming in. And they'll make judgement calls about "should I bring in another reviewer?", "should I encourage/require a forum discussion?", etc.

In my opinion this works in the sense that the job gets done. But it puts pressure on the maintainer to watch everything, and be responsible for pairing up different contributors so they can comfortably ask each others' help.

I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how we could decentralize some of this.

Note, decentralization is the theme for the next community call as well:
https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/weekly-community-call-1-21-2020/581

[vsoch]

Given that we are comfortable creating a user token for discourse and putting it here (and maybe discord has an equivalent?) each could have a topic / thread that is explicitly for #needs-love, and it would fire whenever a pull request is opened via GitHub actions. The question I'm interested in discussing is if we expect the directionality to go to the other way too - e.g., is the topic/thread on the external platform just for an FYI (and the user follows the link here) or should responses to it be sent back? For the latter, we would likely want one topic on discourse to correspond to one pull request, and I'm not sure the same logic works super well for discord given that we have channels (I've never worked with this API, I'm not familiar).

Given two way interaction, it would be a little more complicated because we would need to have some combination of a dispatch event or webhook that is authorized to post back to the repository. It might make sense to first set up the "one way notification only" and then to think more carefully about the more advanced interactions.