Following @sarahboyce’s comment on the ticket about the Easy Pickings flag being a “destination” after “unreserving” a ticket for a sprint, I’d love some brainstorming on maybe merging the concepts.
The “Easy Pickings” experience hasn’t been great. Very little counts as an easy picking; truly easy issues get claimed immediately; they aren’t important enough to prioritize for review; they float out to sea.
I’ve been using “Django Sprints” as more like “Mentorship Pickings” or “Human Pickings”. Or even, “Inappropriate for seasoned contributors, but important enough to prioritize for this feature release, please help”. This is larger than just “beginners”. Especially in areas like the ORM, we need more than “good first issues”, we need “good tenth issues”. If we let a loop where the human role is very attenuated claim such a ticket, we advance the future maintainability of Django not at all.
If it’s “Human Pickings”, of course the human may be using AI assistance, but I have at least some guarantee that the role of the human in the loop is pulling some weight, because they’ve transported themselves to an in-person/virtual sprint/event/discord/whathaveyou.
Should announcing your intentions in some sort of in-person/virtual sprint/event/discord/whathaveyou be the only way to begin contributing? No. Should we encourage it and reserve some tickets for it? Yes!
tl;dr – maybe we replace “Easy Pickings” checkbox with “Mentorship Opportunity” checkbox and use the Owner Field to record the specific opportunity imagined.