Make issues and feature request template cool, welcoming, easy to use and support community building

[MarcSkovMadsen]

My Problem

hvPlot is mentioned as the entry point to the HoloViz ecosystem. I think more is needed to make it ready for that and start building a community of users and contributors. One place is the github Issues.

One problem is there is friction. The templates read ok when wanting to make a contribution, but I as a user have to reformulate all the headings and remove text for them to make sense after that.

Solution

Something ala FastApi

Promote contributions with a header like

Promote larger initiatives at the top

Make the instructions more readable. The current instructions hvPlot has are Ok. But they lack spacing to make them easier to read and a few emojis like a 🐛 to clearly mark what this is about. And then a user should not have to delete all the text and figure out how to reformulate it. On the other hand I would like to avoid as much text as FastApi has.

Alternatives

Templates at https://github.com/stevemao/github-issue-templates

Additional context

I might be willing to work on these if the maintainer(s) confirm they would look positively at a PR. Would you?

[droumis]

Hey @MarcSkovMadsen , thanks for raising this. I personally think reducing friction with github issues and making the process more efficient is a great idea. Particularly the template text. I'm happy to help and provide feedback on a PR, but before we spend time on this I think I'd want the approval (thumbs up, comment) from one of the core devs, since they have a better perspective on priorities.

[maximlt]

Happy to have some fresh eyes @droumis looking into this. My comments would be:

• whatever we do should be consistent across HoloViz (if it's not consistent now, that'd be a first good step). Maybe there are ways to centralize these templates in a repo.
• As a user of other libraries, I find sometimes templates that are over-engineered, restricting me too much, getting in my way. Sometimes so much that I just give up writing the issue. Let's not get there 🙏
• As a dev, I'd like again the template not too get into my way. Being able to quickly record an issue is very valuable. My process right now is when I open an issue, I just delete the whole template and write whatever I want to write. I'd like to keep that option (there could be a free-form template for maintainers maybe?).
• Marc has been pushing to add emojis, but he's also been pushing for us to look more professional to managers. I'm not sure but maybe these two things aren't compatible.

[jbednar]

I think there are improvements that could be made here, and I'd be happy to see concrete proposals for something that could be implemented across HoloViz. I'd vote against much use of emojis, though; I think they make the FastAPI example look like a 2005 MySpace page! :-)