This describes so much what I do and like. Your list is really useful for me. Many thanks!
Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#62What your describing is essentially a business analyst, albeit a technically minded in whilst not being a developer. I consider myself of the same ilk and I think the best thing you can contribute is input and UX/UI design, sanity checking of ideas, feedback from users etc.
The facilitation role between users and developers is so much more than 'documentation' which alot of the comments in this thread seem to suggest.
I suggest contacting a few of the projects listed here, or any you find on GitHub you'd like to contribute to and just offer to help.
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#63Organize the artwork... There is something that always gets in the way of game development in the open source world, and its the artwork assets. Someone just needs to be on top of this component -- coordinating the art from artists contributions, putting it into the project in a way that makes sense, dealing with the requests from developers to format the art a certain way, etc.
Open Source games usually don't hit the sweet spot until someone does this - alas its not always the sexiest part of the project although, it does become the sexiest part of the project pretty fast, eventually.
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#64Accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. Are there - Link skips - Dyslexia-friendly typography (no justification, no hyphens, preferably fonts with distinct glyphs) - A colour scheme useable and legible to the huge population of colour-blind people - Screenreader-friendly HTML - Closed caption for video - or just transcripts A lot of fancy-pants projects are absolutely amateurish when it comes to this, and it onl…
As someone with (mild) dyslexia I didn't even realise there were people out there making friendly typography so I had a look around, e.g. dyslexie font [1] is a pretty cool read. [1] http://www.dezeen.com/2014/11/09/christian-boer-dyslexie-typ...
Yeah, I employ a "Dyslexia" button on my text-heavy blogs that replaces the typeface with OpenDyslexic. Definitely check it out if you don't know about it.
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#65Did you over time develop yourself from being in a technical/developing position into a technical/management position?
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#66With your skillset, you could be doing invaluable work by writing documentation. The world is full of good Free software that is essentially orphaned, because the documentation is practically useless. Many moribund projects could be revitalised with little more than a concise description of what the software does, why you might choose it over the alternatives, and how to get started. Other projects suffer from dreadf…
Documentation often gets cited as the main 'semi-techncal' thing to do for an open-source project.
However, I disagree with the point that moribund projects could be revitalised this way. If the people writing the code have little interest in explaining to other people like themselves how to use it then IMHO writing additional text for less involved people is not going to be very impactful.
Your second point about myopic docs is spot on, though. A human-readable summary can be invaluable but it involves getting your head around what already exists first -- that requires some will from the developers in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#67Accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. Are there - Link skips - Dyslexia-friendly typography (no justification, no hyphens, preferably fonts with distinct glyphs) - A colour scheme useable and legible to the huge population of colour-blind people - Screenreader-friendly HTML - Closed caption for video - or just transcripts A lot of fancy-pants projects are absolutely amateurish when it comes to this, and it onl…
> Dyslexia-friendly typography (no justification, no hyphens, preferably fonts with distinct glyphs)
That's fascinating, I didn't know that was a thing. Could you point out any good resources for learning about it?
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#68With your skillset, you could be doing invaluable work by writing documentation. The world is full of good Free software that is essentially orphaned, because the documentation is practically useless. Many moribund projects could be revitalised with little more than a concise description of what the software does, why you might choose it over the alternatives, and how to get started. Other projects suffer from dreadf…
Documentation often gets cited as the main 'semi-techncal' thing to do for an open-source project. However, I disagree with the point that moribund projects could be revitalised this way. If the people writing the code have little interest in explaining to other people like themselves how to use it then IMHO writing additional text for less involved people is not going to be very impactful. Your second point about my…
I actually ran into this issue with the `argus` network flow generator/processor project, run "by one dude." As a non-developer, but a user, I spent time grinding away at understanding it, mostly as a hobby, and wound up realizing that the "one dude" set his bar pretty high at what he expected of his users' skill sets. I can sincerely appreciate that, but that bar should be lowered so that folks can at least use the software effectively without pissing off the entire mailing list :D
I did just as stated here; lowered the bar for non-developers by producing "on boarding" documentation that takes you from no-to-go in about 30 minutes, massaging my inane questions and failures in mailing list etiquette into an accessible wiki doc (accessible at nsmwiki.org for anyone who is specifically interested).
I take pride in it and it even sits on my resume.
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#69It's not directly answering your situation but I really hope that one day the open source movement will move beyond software and for that we need non-technical people from almost every profession.
I hope the leading product in almost every market category is open source and developed at least partially by volunteers.
Open source beer, where small brewers collaberate with breweries all updating the recipe in github?
Open source mac and cheese showing up on your grocer's shelf?
Open source farm equipment?
Re: Ask HN: How do technical non-developers help with open source projects?
#70There's a lot you can do.
* Writing (doc, blog posts, ...)
* Evangelization (answer questions on IRC/Mailing-lists, help your entourage to start using it, go on live conferences, give talks, ...)
* Testing. Test everything in each new release and give the authors a good bug report when needed. Test the tool on multiple OSs, using multiple versions of a lib, test the different drivers, different dbs, etc. Test the installation procedure and the user features.
* Triaging issues in a bug tracker. What's really a bug, what isn't? What's a major blocker for users? What's a luxury nice-to-have feature? What's too old and not relevant anymore?
You can start doing all this, without actually needing any permission or access to anything. I'd suggest you just let the active members of the community know you exist (they usually hang out on an IRC chan or something like that). That's not even required, if you're shy don't say anything and start working.
As you get more and more active, you're going to be naturally contacted by someone active in the project and from here, you'll usually be given more "official" responsibilities.