I wonder if there's something in this that could be used to provide extra income to open source contributors.
I'd be interested to see GitHub experiment with providing their own service like this for the open source projects it hosts.
A project could designate certain contributors as experts and say you're having a problem with that project, you could talk with an expert via GitHub, for a per-minute fee, with an optional minimum of 15 minutes (for example).
I'd guess it'd be more likely to succeed by being right there integrated in GitHub's UI, rather than shoehorning just a link to Google Helpouts or another service into a project's README.
I'd be interested to see GitHub experiment with providing their own service like this for the open source projects it hosts.
A project could designate certain contributors as experts and say you're having a problem with that project, you could talk with an expert via GitHub, for a per-minute fee, with an optional minimum of 15 minutes (for example).
I'd guess it'd be more likely to succeed by being right there integrated in GitHub's UI, rather than shoehorning just a link to Google Helpouts or another service into a project's README.