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Open Source Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people organizing, marketing or licensing open source development projects. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 9 down vote favorite
3

I really like a specific open source project and would like to contribute to it. Unfortunately I don't know anything about programming. What are meaningful ways in which a non-programmer can contribute in a meaningful way to an open source project?

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1  
lol, geeze. You should be ashamed of that low rep on SO. If it were me I'd delete my account to be honest. ;) – Technik Empire 16 hours ago
    
It's hard to resist the urge to suggest learning how to program. – Pharap 12 hours ago
    
If you know more than one national language, then consider providing translation for a project that is used widely. Git has a translation team that is separate from the programming team. Ubuntu has a similar translation effort. – Philip Oakley 5 hours ago
up vote 13 down vote

There are lots of things to do around open source projects which do not require any programming knowledge at all. Among them are things like:

  • User Documentation: Programmers love writing code but hate writing documentation. And if we like to write documentation it's mostly the technical documentation for other developers. As a result, many open source projects have a user documentation which is hard to understand for non-technical users, full of gaps and in many places out of date. As an experienced user you can help to keep the documentation useful.
  • User Support: Programmers are already very busy programming, so they are glad about people who keep the newbies off their back by answering their questions. This goes hand-in-hand with user documentation, because by listening to the user's problems you learn where the documentation needs to be improved.
  • Artwork: Do you have artistic talent? Then you could work on the art assets of the project like icons or logos. Not just the software itself but also its website and promotional material can certainly benefit from your skills.
  • Internationalization: Are you fluent in a different (non-programming) language than the primary language the developers communicate in? Then you can help with translating the software and its documentation into that language.
  • Making good bug reports: We can only fix issues we are aware of. Unfortunately many bug reports we receive from users are of very poor quality. To fix a bug we must know exactly what steps must be taken to reliably cause the bug to happen. When you take the time to research a bug, isolate the exact conditions which make it appear and provide us with exact instructions, you can save us a lot of time.
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up vote 5 down vote

You might want to check out e.g. Fedora's page on how and for what to join. You'll see plenty of tasks for non-programmers. Some of the highly regarded members of the Fedora community don't do any programming.

You'll probably find similar calls elsewhere.

Disclosure: I'm a long time Red Hat and then Fedora user, currently an Ambassador for Chile.

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