[Community] Curate and protect a queue of good first issues

[yifeif-nv]

Summary

Maintain a set of genuinely approachable issues reserved for new community contributors.

Each issue should be independently understandable, bounded, and small enough to complete without deep knowledge of the entire codebase.

Tasks

• Define the requirements for applying the good first issue label.
• Require a clear problem statement, bounded scope, affected files or components, expected behavior, and validation commands.
• Exclude issues that require private infrastructure, restricted artifacts, broad architecture changes, or undocumented domain knowledge.
• Create an initial queue of available contributor-friendly issues.
• Assign a maintainer who can answer questions for every queued issue.
• Document how a contributor can claim an issue and how long a claim remains reserved without activity.
• Avoid taking reserved issues internally unless they become blocking or the contributor releases the claim.
• Define expected maintainer response times for questions and submitted pull requests.
• Review the queue regularly and remove completed, stale, blocked, or misleading items.
• Track whether labeled issues are successfully completed by first-time contributors and refine the criteria accordingly.
• Add the claiming and contribution process to the contributor guide.

Acceptance criteria

New contributors can find available, well-scoped work, understand the expected change and tests without reverse-engineering the project, claim an issue through a documented process, and receive a maintainer response within the published target.