Add a way to semi-automate support for first-time package authors

[shonfeder]

Integration should be about people, not just software. One of the bright silver linings of the opam way is that every package publication involves a personal interaction between the package author/maintainer and the opam repo maintainers.

While we need to move to automated publication of established, correct packages (see, e.g., ocaml/opam-repository#26106) in order to avoid toil and improve our throughput, we have good reason to offer special support and acknowledgement of first-time publishers (e.g., ocaml/opam-repository#26652 (comment)). This is an opportunity to ease their technical experience and their social connections within the ecosystem.

This issue is just at the "gathering ideas" stage, but ideas we may explore include:

• Automated pairing of new publishers with volunteer community mentors on a round-robin schedule.
• Encouraging package authors to join our preferred communication platform (slack, discourse, matrix, whatever).
• Automating reminders to announce the package publication, or automating the announcement.
• Automate staring their repo (if on GitHub) and following the user from opam-bot.

The lowest hanging fruit is just automating a welcome message so that maintainers know they are interacting with a first-time publisher (akin to the notice we get in discourse for someone's first post).

[shonfeder]

If we can get a (probably rotating) group to opt in as a "welcome party", we could cultivate an amazing first experience for people who publish on opam. E.g., we the welcome party could do stuff like:

• Connect with the new publisher on whatever social platforms they both support.
• Make PRs into the new publisher's project to help fix common issues that turn up during package publication.
• Provide peer review and support generally for new package authors and OSS contributors.

The ideal cohort for this kind of welcome party would be beginners and intermediate OCamlners probably: they have the most to gain from this kind of support, both in terms of technical know-how and social connections. But we would probably need to bootsrap such a tradition through participation of more experienced contributors.

[samoht]

That's a really great idea!

[punchagan]

👍 on this being a great idea!

• Make PRs into the new publisher's project to help fix common issues that turn up during package publication.
• Provide peer review and support generally for new package authors and OSS contributors.

This makes the whole contribution experience a whole lot more friendly and welcoming. A couple of years ago I tried contributing a package to melpa (An Emacs Package Archive) and was pleasantly surprised by some suggestions given by the maintainers, which improved the package itself a lot!