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Ask Slashdot: Where to Host Many Small, Related Projects?
MellowTigger writes "I work at a non-profit organization. I am looking for a site where we can register an account under our group's name, then spawn multiple projects to solicit programmer help for our organization. The current projects that we have in mind are small and probably not of interest to the wider world, although one very large project is possible. I need a site that emphasizes our non-profit as the benefactor rather than the wider world, since most projects are so specific that wider applicability seems slim. We would need help with various technologies including at least Powershell and SQL. At the moment, my available options emphasize individual projects of public interest, so we would have to spawn multiple independent projects, seeming to spam the host with 'pointless' minor tasks. We already have technical people seeking to donate time. We just need a way to coordinate skill matching, document sharing, and code submission out on the web. What do you suggest?"
Github. Sourceforge. Wow that was hard.
I run it for my own personal projects, and it works good for me. Its not incredibly fancy but it does work for what its designed to do, which is assign people to projects, tracks commits, and lets you see diffs, etc. I don't know if you need some of the bells and whistles these other sites offer or not. It does require setup, and running your own server/instance/whatever to have it on. The only hiccup I've ever ran into (which was due to how git works) was when someone committed a 1.5gb psd file to a repo and we ran out of memory on the small instance indefero was running on.
http://www.indefero.net/
If you are making the repositories public, GitHub is the way to go. You only have to pay if the repositories are private. It gives you the ability for people to send pull requests for changes (which you can choose to accept), issue tracking, etc. The pull request system is really nice, because you ultimately have control of what gets pulled into your project, but anyone can pull it down. It's pretty much the standard hosting, and works across all platforms.
Random Musings
Set up a slackware server (can even be on high-end workstation class hardware as long as you have a UPS powering it) running SVN Server and apache. There are plenty of good browser based CMS packages available. I like Drupal + Storm, but that's just me. If SQL Server is an absolute requirement, rather than MySQL, set up each developer's workstation with SQL Server Express. TortoiseSVN is a great Windows SVN client that may be easier to set up than git. Using github gives you the advantage of a decentralized repository, but doesn't come with any kind of project management. DynDNS will allow you to register your own box by name without having to pay for a static public IP address and public nameserver. Remember, though, that you don't necessarily have to host your project management and your code repository in the same place. That seems like where you're getting yourself confused.
I hope that the OP doesn't expect programmers to flock to support his project, just because it is present on a social coding site.
They won't. Probably not a single one. Even if he uses the most popular host providing such services, GitHub.
For the most part, there is no contribution whatsoever, unless the contributor has some stake. The most successful GitHub projects are those that have some kind of corporate sponsorship, and you have several big companies contributing one or more full-time employees to the project.
Beyond that, you might get some contribution to the project if a lot of people are using it, and some of them modify it to suit their own needs, and either they altruisticlly contribute their modifications back(not common), or (more commonly) by contributing back they absolve themselves of having to maintain their own separate fork.
For projects with, say, 100-200 watchers (which probably means 10X that many users), it's typical to get maybe a pull request or two per year.
So, hopefully the OP has some volunteers lined-up already, or knows where to find them. They aren't going to appear out of nowhere.
I think it would be silly to set-up your own server for this. GitHub is the goto place today. It has a good-enough Issues system that is well integrated with code management, and makes it easy to publish documentation.
Have you considered asking whatever the "people seeking to donate time" say they use for source hosting and going with whatever the majority loves doing?
egypt urnash minimal art.
Perhaps in light of not being free, they should change their prefix. Might I recommend "sup". It's short for supported. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Nobody mentioned redmine?
Combine it with git via ssh, set it up on a cheap VPS or your local box with forwarded ports and be done with it.