Open Source For Non-Coders
What, How and Why to contribute to Open Source Communities
I am Viswaprasath from India, started contributing to Open source communities back in 2013. I first got involved with communities with the help of Google Students Ambassador program, with help of this program I was able to reach many students learn about Google Products and Evangelize them to other colleges. After the end of 1 year, was not sure what to do, so started learning about Mozilla Communities. In this blog post we can learn about various ways we can contribute to Open source communities, why we should contribute to Open source Communities and in another blog post will share how it will help us in long term.
How to Contribute to Open source
There is one of the strange assumption, only those who can write code can contribute to Open source project. This is one of the biggest assumption, and its obviously wrong. Think about running a small business or store, there will be huge number of things to be done like sales, marketing, inventory similarly for every project we have got lot of things to do.
Help with Localization
In most parts of world today English may be widely used language but not many are comfortable using Software just in English. Using the software in our native language will be more easier and comfortable to learn faster and use easily. It's not easy to maintain the software in many languages. Some of the software are written at one place and with help of lot of translators the project is translated and shipped all around the world.
Help with Documentation
Maintaining the API documentation is very hard. Each and every day some new features comes up and it should be documented. Its much harder job than coding for myself. It needs different level of understanding of audience.
You can also translate the documentation and help easily how to start use the software. MDN documents are translated very well in many languages.
- You can contribute to AsyncAPI documentation and improve state of Event-Driven Architectures.
- You can contribute to Mozilla Developer Network and help Web Developers
- Can checkout various organization participating in Google seasons of Docs
Advocate the software
I would say this is one of my most loved part of contribution to Mozilla. I used Firefox a lot (mozilla is more beyond Firefox), and love their DevTools and Add-ons a lot. I also use Chrome, but when it comes to Devtools I am for sure will argue Firefox got the best. Keeping argument aside, if you love the software or library you can share about them and help others to adopt them to use it.
When I say advocate it means you can share what you love in the form of blog post (my sample series for WebExtensions ), you can create youtube videos ( video playlist for WebExtensions ) and share the feedback to the team. Always there will be room for improvement, when you share it to the team they can try to improve.
Suggest improvements / Help finding bugs
No software in the world are 100% perfect. There will be some places where it wont work. Most of the times many open source communities won't have enough resources to build, test and deploy the products. They will be testing in majority of places and push to live, but sometimes at some place the issue will come and only if it is reported developer who created the product will know them. There will also be lot of improvements which can be done, which the maintainer team will miss; but when the global contributors come and share their use cases they can build the product and shape it.
- You can contribute to Ubuntu Testing during their Testing Week
- You can write automation Testing for Mozilla Add-ons Website
- You can suggest features to AsyncAPI website or to their tools
- Wikimedia Unit Testing
Supporting in online forum
Whenever some bugs comes there are lot of ways it can be fixed. I would always suggest people to write blog, so it can be visible to search engines properly and stay as document for long time. Another way we can support the product in online is helping them in support forums. When the products / library are so big, there will be lots and lots of questions on how to do this or that, it will not be easier for maintainer or staff team to answer everyone. Sometime even staff team may not be aware of the solution to fix, when we face issue and if we fix them it will be great if we spend time in support forum and help. Think of developers without stackoverflow, how hard it would be; likewise end-user to end-user help in forums will be great than coming from creators.
- Can participate in Support Mozilla project
- Participate in Ubuntu Forums
- Join discord and help Appwrite team
Unleash your Design Skills
Since many projects are code based projects, there are very high chances they will build features well. Many numbers of features will go, but the UI/UX part will be not great some times. When UI/UX is not great many projects start failing and the adoption decreases.
As mentioned above, there are lot of ways we can contribute to Open source communities; In case if you have question Why to contribute to Open Source Communities you can check my another article on this.