Sustainability of open source is a known challenge and one that depends on a project’s capability to attract a community of contributors (and not only coders).
A common strategy to smooth the onboarding of new contributions is by tagging some project issues as good first issues, helping newcomers to locate suitable development tasks in the project. The idea is that by helping them to successfully complete a first contribution, they will keep engaged and contribute to additional issues, increasing the level of complexity of the tasks they will be open to handle. There are even websites listing good first issues from multiple projects. And research works aiming at automatically classifying an issue as a good first one.
I propose to apply a similar concept to research, tagging some research ideas as “good first papers”, i.e. research ideas that are valuable but easy enough (in terms of the required background, expertise, complexity of the potential solution,…) to be tackled by people that want to start a research career. Maybe even a part-time one (as most open source contributors who can also devote some hours per week to the project).
I bet many of us have plenty of research ideas that we’ll never have the time to develop. For a variety of reasons, maybe we are now concentrated in other areas, or more challenging problems, or whatever. But the ideas are still valuable. And if somebody took the lead to work on them, they could be transformed into valuable contributions. Maybe “just” incremental research but still valuable research. And we could still help (same as first time contributors need guidance) but being “good first papers”, the amount of dedication this supervision would require will be reasonable (and therefore feasible.
And who knows? Maybe some of these new “amateur” researchers will end up joining your team as full-time ones! Given how difficult is to recruit good candidates for PhD / postdoc positions, that alone would be a major ROI!
