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.
Using GitHub is a skill of it’s own, and requires knowledge of coding practices. It’s hugely confronting to someone without coding experience
Yes, absolutely but github (which is only an example, mind you) has a lot of consumer friendly accomodations like github gui and cli.
You can edit stuff directly in someone elses repo (or so it seems) in the web browser. I know you have to do a branch and a pull request but thats something that can be worked on.
Since you’re trying to build bridges with this post, I just want you to know that everything you mentioned in this comment is far beyond a non-programmer and sounds totally incomprehensible. It’s jargon soup. I don’t say this to dunk on you or anything, I just wanted to let you know how high your own skill level is, because it can be easy to forget sometimes. People without those skills won’t be able to follow this kind of explanation.
I’m interested in where the limits to expectations lie here. I’m not trying to be a jerk when I say this next part but I do worry I may come off that way but I’m trying to figure out the boundaries of what a “reasonable” expectation is so I can make tasks like this easier for my own team (completely unrelated to this project but it’s essentially the same problem).
Is it not reasonable to expect people to type into a search engine something like “GitHub help” and then poke around in the links that come up?
… Well I’ll be damned, I tried my own method before commenting, and the first link that comes up is a red herring, how obnoxious. I was hoping it’d be a link to the docs, not GitHub support. I guess I just answered my own question: no that is not reasonable.
As a technical user, I am still at a loss for how to help a non-technical user in an algorithmic way that will work for most non-technical users x.x guess I’ll be thinking about this problem some more lol
(I guess I’m rambling but I’m gonna post this anyways in case anyone wants to chatter about it with me)
Thanks for the heads up. Yes, I‘m indeed trying to help and apparently some people really want me to stop but I wont. I‘m happy a few actually appreciate it.
The jargon soup is not intentional, I was trying to head off a couple smartypants that will tell me that editing a repository in the browser actually just makes a branch.
You can’t do it right anyway. If you facilitate change, people will crucify you. So I just take hate and dont care at all.
Tried submitting a relatively simple change to the Ansible code base once. Added an option to the telnet module to support different ports. Submitted a pull request. Was told I needed to change and update the documentation. Didn’t know how to do that, and I didn’t get any guidance, so I abandoned the pull request. Kept on using my own hack until someone else added the option.
Make contributing easy, and more people will contribute.
Maybe it would help to have some kind of boilerplate language and framework for contributing that other projects can make use of.
Solution should not be technical.
CONTRIBUTING.md should be very simple to follow and have all the steps necessary to submit a successful contribution.
Have a section in there for first time contributors. Link to a YouTube video outlining the basics if need be. Explain the process from the very beginning. If you want fresh talent to contribute, educate them on the right way to do so. (Perhaps this is an opportunity for boilerplate language. However, best current practice may change over time.)
Be pleasant to and patient with contributors who fall short. They may never have contributed anything before. In that case, you are an ambassador not just for your project but for all open source projects. Don’t be a jackass who drives away talent just because they didn’t do something exactly perfect.
Because UX/UI is just as painful as coding.
Asking for a friend: do you code? Because most coders say this and thats my initial point. :)
What use is a readme written by someone who doesn’t know the code, doesn’t know the internal designs, the design goals, the plans of the current maintainers, anything? It’d be no better than asking ChatGPT to write it for you.
Yeah, that’s a good point, but the readmes that I’ve seen written by those who wrote the code themselves are not much better. Sure, they know what it’s all about, which is precisely why it oftentimes isn’t much help for a user.
What’s needed is someone who’d read the initial readme (written by the guy who wrote the code itself) and ask questions about the parts that were “too straightforward” to be included, or weren’t explained clearly enough, or to bring down the general overview back to Earth.
And if there’s yet another person who’d go over this second pass, and keep it from being too dumbed down, even better. Keep it to the level of the average user. That requires knowing the kind of person who’d likely use the program.
Edit:
Sorry for all the duplicate replies. I keep getting network errors.
I‘m sure a lot of people who correct text, add references, structure and pictures to a readme would disagree with you.
I‘m not sure if you‘re a coder but it you are, you should know that coding and usability are two entirely separate things.
Why does it have to be documenting internal designs, architecture, and all that? Why not app user manuals or install guides or any of myriad other sorts of documentation?
Just because one specific scenario may not be suited doesn’t mean no scenario is suited to what op is proposing.
I mean first, what kind of projects are we even talking about, libraries? APIs? Apps? Command line tools? Etc?
Because the technical writing needs vary depending on what kind of project. They don’t all require coding skills for success.
Technical Writer is a skill. It’s a fairly well paid one too.
Being able to make good documentation is hard.
User Experience (UX), user interface (UI), and graphic design are all also surprisingly difficult. Much of which is integrally tied to the code.
I came here to say something similar.
Just writing documentation alone, is a skill worthy of a full-time job! Of course, there’d be people who can volunteer their time to do that, but without someone with such skill at least taking a look and making sure it’s understandable to someone who’s got no idea what’s going on? Let’s just say that open source software help documentation is filled with such examples.
Yeah, I probably should think about taking money for it but making descriptions and manuals is just something I like to do. And there are a lot of people who also do this but dont call it „technical writing“. Often it is things like doing glossars or explaining abbreviations. That helps a lot.
Because every time you try to suggest more modern interfaces you run into the type of people that like it when software looks utilitarian and bland.
I’m a programmer and I find dealing with other programmers frustrating and pointless if you discuss anything that’s not programming related.
They’ll happily discuss algorithms or language paradigms for hours but if you mention design, UI/X, marketing, etc they shut you down claiming some greater-technical reason for the feature.
Lemmy is a good, recent example. As part of being a web dev I’ve also done a lot of SEM. The devs have a Github issue for making readable URLs. They completely refused to consider it claiming other technical requirements for not allowing it. Any arguments outside the narrow technical reasons are discounted. So what if readable URLs will help people find the site through Google easier (because Google will better index the site). It breaks X feature and we don’t see a need. No discussion and no listening.
If devs don’t see a strict technical need for something they ignore it at best and at worst they insult you for being an idiot.
Hubris and ignorance make it a PITA to deal with them.
