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
I code but I found it to have quite a learning curve.
Maybe the first step is to develop a “how to use git for improving documentation on a FOSS project” lol
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)
It’s super hard to know this and there won’t be a consistent answer because everyone is different. You have to meet people where they are.
I think you did answer your own question on this one. I’ll also say that as a somewhat technical user but still not a heavily technical user like some people here, GitHub is a really baffling website. It’s hard to even figure out how to download something from it. I would strongly encourage anyone who wants to reach non-technical users to avoid GitHub. It’s made for programmers and it doesn’t make sense to anyone else without training.
