In September I built Open Source Radar, a list of open, unassigned beginner issues from active projects that refreshes twice a day, plus a guide for your first contribution. Right now it tracks about 3,400 issues across 1,170 projects.
Then October happened. 79 different people got a pull request merged into it, 108 PRs in total. About 35 were translations, 15 were language quickstarts, the rest were site and pipeline fixes. The website now speaks 16 languages.
I didn't plan for that. A few things I did along the way turned out to matter a lot more than I expected.
/claim and a 7-day timeout
At first people asked "can I work on this?" and then had to wait for me to answer.
So I added a tiny workflow: comment /claim and you're assigned on the spot, max two issues per person. If there's no PR or update after 7 days, the bot frees the issue with a friendly note. Nobody waits for me, and nobody sits on an issue forever.
Write the issue so someone new can start
Every issue says what to change, which file, and how to test it. "Add a Ukrainian locale" lists the exact files and the test command. The PRs that came back were better than I expected, because the issue already answered the questions.
Review within a day, and fix the last 10% yourself
I try to review every PR within a day. When something's almost right, I merge it and push the small fix myself in a follow-up (a missing test, a plural form, a broken relative link) instead of asking for a fourth round of changes. Then I tell them what I changed and why, so they learn it without the back-and-forth.
Polish and Ukrainian taught me that one: "3 months" and "5 months" use different words. The site has proper plural forms now because a contributor's translation exposed it.
Never run out of starter issues
Traffic dipped on the days I had only one or two free good first issues left. So now a daily job opens the next untranslated guide chapter whenever fewer than 6 are free, and CONTRIBUTING has a "nothing free that fits?" table by skill, with things that never run out.
What I'd tell another maintainer
- Make claiming instant.
- Write issues for someone who has never seen your code.
- Merge and polish rather than nitpick.
- Credit everyone in the README. People share that link.
If you're looking for a first issue, the radar is here, filtered by language. And if you want to contribute to the radar itself, there are always a few open issues, from translations to Python.
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