Ask HN: Who needs non-technical contributors? • Hacker News Board

Post by orangewin » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 11:08 AM UTC

Inspired by the recent post, 'Who needs contributors?' [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12405712] I thought it would be interesting to see if there are any open source projects out there that might be interested in non-technical contributors. It might be a great way to get non-technical people involved with open source and might inspire some to learn code.

As per the original post:

Looking for contributors to your project? Feel free to post any project that may interest HN readers, with a strong preference towards open source. Please follow this general format:

Project name Project description What do you hope to build this month? What kind of skills do you need? Link to your GitHub or somewhere else you'd like to onboard new contributors, like your project management software or chat room. Your license(s)

Post by brudgers » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 2:20 PM UTC

I've thought about why open-source software projects often run short of non-technical contributions. The factors I suspect:

1. The non-technical roles in a software project are less autonomous. A programmer's pull request for a new feature is likely to be seen positively and accepted. A designer's logo is likely to inspire non-designer's to share their opinions and aesthetic preferences.

2. The work is less creative. Coding up a new feature or quashing a bug can be an epic adventure. Writing a tutorial on an existing API less so.

3. Open source software tends toward directly solving the problems of programmers. ZeroMQ, Jquery, Capistrano, Bootstrap, etc. don't create economic value for community managers.

4. In any given market, programmers are likely to be better compensated than non-technical people. In light of where the economic benefits of open source software tend to accrue, there's a sense in which seeking non-technical contributions is a bit like welfare for the rich.

The question posits one benefit: a non-technical person might be inspired to learn to code. Wouldn't such a person's time be better spent learning to code instead? Wouldn't their time be better spent doing paid work in an environment that might just as well inspire them to learn to code?

Makes me wonder which open source projects are paying non-technical contributors?