If you ever come across an issue and you think to yourself, "Gee, it sure would be nice to fix that, and it would probably only take me a couple of minutes..." then please *don't* fix it -- instead tag it with the issue tag "novice" so that it shows up at: http://drupal.org/patch/novice (all "novice" issues across all projects) and http://drupal.org/patch/novice/core (all Drupal core "novice" issues) Why? * There are lots of eager people out there who want to contribute more to Drupal and get started with patching, or with documentation, or whatever. But you point them at an issue queue with 5,000+ active issues and they get overwhelmed and don't know where to start. By specifically identifying "novice" issues, we give them a nice short- list of "low-hanging fruit" that they can use to get their feet wet. * If you already know how to patch, we could use your smarts elsewhere. Like, for example, mentoring the new contributors taking on these patches. :) If you find yourself with 15 minutes you don't know what else to do with, please find more novice patches rather than solving these. * New contributors are the perfect people to help us refine our documentation so that it makes more sense to other new contributors. So I'd love for there to be an army of folks in #drupal on-hand to help people tackling novice issues get past the initial bumps in the road, and helping to guide these folks toward doing documentation improvements. Those of you who've been on this list a long time might remember previous attempts at this with the "patchnewbie" user (http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2007-October/026945.html ), but this is a much more workable way to identify easier issues because anyone can add this tag. So, please do! I'll make a blog post in a week or two once we start getting this list fleshed out that will hopefully lead to some new faces in the queues. :) -Angie