Pathway from consumer to contributor

We often get requests like "I am very interested in astronomy and/or OSS and I want to contribute" or "I love using astropy and I want to contribute," followed by "how do I start?"

Alternately, we get direct comments from new people on existing open issues such as, "Can I work on this?"

Just throwing contributing guide at them seem to have little success. Sometimes a few brave ones go on ahead and submit PRs but some of the PRs had to be thrown out because they were incomplete or not the desirable fix. The PRs that got further also went stale and needed maintainers to wrap up, though most of the times the stale-bot just stepped in and closed it.

What else can we do to increase the percentage of PRs merging from first-time contributors?

This is a pre-cursor for:

* #445

Start by reviewing the existing contributing guide, the examples of incomplete or stale first-time-contributor PRs described in the issue, and follow-up issue #445. Done means the project has an agreed, actionable pathway that helps prospective contributors choose work and understand how a contribution can reach completion.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.