title: Setting up an association between Users and Bounties in Rails
body: <p>Similar to how things work here on Stackoverflow, I'm setting up an app where a user can post a bounty and other users can volunteer to complete it. </p>
  
  <p>The only difference is the user selects who performs the bounty. So for instance if a bounty is created and three people volunteer to complete it the creator can select 1/3, 2/3, or 3/3.</p>
  
  <p>When a bounty is created, it's considered <strong>open</strong>, when the user selects a in progress: <strong>in-progress</strong>, and when complete: <strong>complete</strong>.</p>
  
  <p>For starters how would I setup my associations where a user is the sole owner of a bounty but <strong>other</strong> users belong to the bounty but as <code>volunteers</code> and if selected become <code>participants</code>. Should this be done as a self-referential association? It seems like setting up two new models may/may not be redundant.</p>
  
  <pre><code>class User &lt; ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :bounties
  end
  
  class Bounty &lt; ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :user
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As far as the status of the bounty should I setup three different boolean based columns in the bounties table?</p>
  
  <p><code>:open, :in_progess, :complete</code></p>