Non software contributors in Free Society
vadania
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05. enero 2008
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We need more contributors to the Free Software community, right?
Well, my take is, we aren't getting any spectacular numbers of new contributors from the software industry. We need to address different contributors: graphic artists, office writers, psychologists. We need to get creative about what contributions we ask!
How many times did you have something to write and did not know where to start?
How would it be to have a template to start from? Proprietary software vendors do ship a lot of templates with their office products. Why are we lagging behind? Can't we make a public web service that integrates easily into our free office suites? Publishing such a template could be as easily as “Save as”, and office writers that would submit their templates would get the benefit of improving the template.
Psychologists? What do we need them for?
Well, I'm sure you heard about psychologists in usability studies of proprietary software. How many such studies have you heard of about free software? Very few is my answer. It is worthy to note that usability is the biggest complaint to our products. And it's not like they did not offer their help, it's that we never asked them.
If we do want free society we also need free content, not only free software. A free society citizen is truly both a receiver of someone else's work and a contributor. But right now most of the contributions to free society are in software development – not necessarily on top of the list of most interesting activities everybody can do.
It's like inviting people to a karaoke party, but requiring them to read our music sheets and our instruments. Free software alone is nice, but you need to understand and like coding or bug reporting.
In short, we need to let users contribute what they want, not only what we ask them to. It must be easy for them to submit their work, not only our very much needed bug reports. Start enabling non software developers do their work in Free Society!
This document is in public domain
