As the title say, how can I contribute to OSS without the an IT background ?
I know I can of course donate and I also know some ask for translation but French is usually well translated on most software I use.
A few often overlooked ways to contribute:
- artistic contributions: logos, banners
- user interface design (I wish more UX folks participated in OSS, many projects could use the love)
- improving documentation: as a new and/or novice user, you’re probably more sensitive to jargon that developers overlook and can help make documentation more useful to others like you
- accessibility testing: testing software using accessibility settings like high contrast color schemes and screen readers. these use cases are often overlooked
- project management: participate in the issues, see if the team wants help triaging or managing a discussion/chat platform
Even if not code, some of these are quite specialized. Just be realistic about where you can add something useful.
For all of these, it is critical that you first contact the maintainers and ask what they would find useful. Be mindful that it’s also work for the maintainers to manage your help. The only “wrong” way to participate in open source is to drop a bunch of work on someone unprompted.
Generally, if a project already has a clear call for contributions or a contribution guide, that is a good indicator that the maintainers are willing to do a bit of community management to bring in help. I would only suggest investing energy in those projects if you have the choice.
Even if you’re not technical, it should be possible for you to learn how to write a good bug report if you’re interested and as a longtime developer I can tell you from experience that a really good bug report is a real delight to receive.
And if you’re specifically seeking out bugs, many open source projects provide some form of beta or nightly releases that need special attention before they ship it as an official release.
Do you have any resources for that?
Simon Tatham wrote this several decades ago, but I still think it’s all excellent advice:
Thank you for the resource! I’ll also try bug triage. It looks like a good way to learn what is useful for developpers
Just read it can confirm it’s excellent advice as someone who written quite a few bug reports. Thanks for posting! Might share it at work. Maybe then I won’t be the one who submitts 95% of the teams bug reports😭
Docs or QA. If you find bugs that you’re able to test, it can be helpful to add a comment whether you were able to validate it or not. A lot of times basic information is missing, like screenshots, logs, and versions. This means step one for the maintainer is probing for more info
Thank you for your response!
KDE and Libre Office are the two OSS I use the most and look like an easy starting point. I’ll look into it.
money
- Bug reports
- Sharing on forums, private groups, website like AlternativeTo, etc…
- Documentation
- Financial contribution even if small (Open Collective, Liberapay, Bitcoin, PayPal, Ko-Fi, Cryptocurrencies,…)
- Localization / Translation
Are you technically skilled using whatever software you are trying to help? many FOSS projects need help with their documentation.
Not that much. Even for bug reporting, I don’t encounter much bugs when using OSS (KDE and Libre Office mostly) and I will not complain about it :)
Documentation is always needed. If you have any aptitude at all for explaining things to people, it’s almost certain that you’d be able to help there.
If you don’t know where to start, I can recommend starting with making a tutorial for doing whatever it was that you yourself last found difficult to learn how to do.
Helping test!!! We on the Jellyfin for Roku team have been begging peeps to help test code changes and releases before they are published for years. We get oh so little response, so it mostly ends up the two of us test each others changes on our 2 or 3 devices and if it works, it goes out.
We’re begging for testers. I’m sure other projects are as well.
You can also promote them in OSS focused forums many people might not know about those softwares and OSS doesn’t have money to spend on ad campaigns.
You have found a niche maybe. Find a FOSS that needs french translation for it’s documents?
send pull requests using vibe coding :)
ps: don’t.
I tried but no one seems to appreciate my contributions.
You can see all of my ongoing projects here: http://localhost:5000/
FOSS people are so ungrateful!
