Disclaimer
Not trying to blame anyone here. I‘m just taking an idea I‘ve read and spinning it further:
Intro
A lot of people use free open source software (foss), Linux being one of them. But a lot less actually help make this software. If I ask them why, they always say „I don’t have the coding skills!“.
Maybe its worth pointing out that you don‘t need them. In a lot of cases it’s better to not have any so you can see stuff with a „consumer view“.
In that situation you can file issues on github and similar places. You can write descriptions that non technical people can understand. You can help translate and so on, all depending on your skills.
Other reasons?
I‘d really like to know so the foss community can talk about making it worthwile for non coders to participate.
It takes a certain kind of a skill set and experience to be able to translate this “consumer view” into something that can be acted upon by a developer.
Sure, the skill set can be developed, the knowledge (about software development, the available technologies, and having an idea of what is and isn’t feasible in the first place) can be built up, and the experience (communicating with developers) can be accrued, but that really stops a lot of people from even thinking of contributing.
Perhaps a subset of the (open-source) community can help in developing these (skills, knowledge, experience) among interested people. Teach people how to look for issues, bugs, or come up with feature requests; teach them how to put these into a form that’s easily understood and appreciated by the developers, and finally, teach them how to communicate with developers without losing the “non-techie user POV” which makes their feedback valuable in the first place.
IDK though, having read what I’ve just written, it seems to be quite a task.
I think you are totally on the right track but yes, the task is massive. Thats why I asked. I‘m trying to help with making it happen. And asking questions is one way of doing so. :)
Yeah. And I’m just throwing what I think is a reasonable idea, but there’s this nagging feeling I’ve got inside that goes “how can you be so sure no one’s thought about it before? Maybe there’s something more pertinent and basic that stops them from doing just that?”
Totally relatable. I‘m asking myself the same. The answer is: as long as we dont ask, we wont get an answer, so here we are, asking questions. :)
It sounds like we need PM’s to act as a liason between developers and end-users to bridge the difference in jargon and way-of-thinking.
I never thought I’d say having PM’s were going to help. Ironic.
That’s supposed to be part of their job, right? Along with coordinating the dev team’s efforts: who works on which, which aspects of the project is to be prioritized, which bugs are to be fixed ASAP; and other things that doesn’t come to mind at the moment.
But what I am actually imagining when I made that reply is on the other side of the “business-dev” divide. I’m actually thinking of someone who’s leading the QA team? I guess? I don’t even have any idea how it all works out on large corporate software projects.