this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
155 points (87.8% liked)

Asklemmy

44135 readers
606 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.