Contributing to Open Source without being a developer

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2021-07-06 11:00:05

People often think that contributing code is the only way to help with an Open Source project. While that's certainly super helpful, there's a lot of other meaningful ways to help, which are as important as developing.

Documentation is a super important part of a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) project. You can have the best project out there, if there's no documentation explaining how to install it, configure it or troubleshoot it, users will have a hard time.

The thing is, documentation is not the funniest thing to do, so developers quite often tend to do it at the last moment, or expedite it, or not do it at all. So having volunteers who take over that part is super welcome, and really useful.

Of course this means that you must have installed and used the project, and understand what its goal are. Level of contribution could be "start from scratch" or simply check that the documentation is still up-to-date, especially after a new version has been released:

As for the tools used, it will vary from one project to another: it could be a simple GitHub wiki page, or a more complex site with a WYSIWYG editor.