ER: Add start dates and end dates to projects

[KwameTaylor]

Emergent Requirement - Problem

For a future feature, we need to have the start date of a project

Details

1. In the future, when we add start and end dates in the sponsor-partner.yml file, we will be able to tell if someone is a founding partner/sponsor if we also have a start date on the project.
2. When we move the information to the People Depot project, it will require project start dates.

Issue you discovered this emergent requirement in

• ER: Sponsor section on About Us page is hardcoded  #5948

Date discovered

2024-05-05

Did you have to do something temporarily

• YES
• NO

Who was involved

@bonniewolfe @roslynwythe @KwameTaylor

What happens if this is not addressed

Needing to refer back into the past manually to recall this information on older projects

Resources

• https://github.com/hackforla/website/blob/gh-pages/_data/external/github-data.json
• https://github.com/hackforla/website/tree/gh-pages/_projects

Recommended Action Items

• Make a new issue
• Discuss with team
• Let a Team Lead know

Potential solutions [draft]

• Create instructions on how to find the date using a github action (large issue)
• Create Epic issue (which is dependent on the instructions being done and has a medium label and issue making level 3)
  • Create issue template for medium issues where the person working on this issue follows the instructions and finds the date on the repo
• Make an issue from the epic to test it.

We need to store the date a repo started. We probably don't need to ever pull this twice (unlike languages, etc), although we will need it for any new repos we add

• to get the date
  • look at the first commit to a project repo
  • If there are multiple repos for the same project, we should use the repo that has the oldest start date
• where to store it?
  • store it in the project.md files

[github-actions]

Hi @KwameTaylor.

Please don't forget to add the proper labels to this issue. Currently, the labels for the following are missing:

• Complexity, Role, Feature

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[t-will-gillis]

@ExperimentsInHonesty your thoughts?

Following is one way to find a project start date using a GitHub Action:

• The GitHub REST API (version 2022-11-18) to access information about a project's GitHub repo is here. Note that the created_at date is returned with the "Example response".
• The API's owner variable is 'hackforla', and the repo variable is the repo for the project, for example 'website'.
• With this info, a .yml can be written to trigger a small workflow that returns the created_at date for a project's repo. Continuing with the example for the 'website' repo:

  # https://docs.github.com/en/rest/repos/repos?apiVersion=2022-11-28#get-a-repository
  # Example workflow to query REST API to find start date given a repo's name
  name: Find Start Date
  
  on:
    workflow_dispatch:
  
  jobs:
    Find_Start_Date:
      runs-on: ubuntu-latest
      steps:
        - name: Retrieve Repo
          id: retrieve-repo
          uses: actions/github-script@v7
          with:
            script: |
              const OWNER = 'hackforla';
              const REPO = 'website';
              results = await github.request('GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}', {
                owner: OWNER,
                repo: REPO
              });
              const START_DATE = results.data.created_at
              console.log(`The repo for project "${REPO}" created on: ${START_DATE.slice(0,10)}`);