Non-coding project participants

[dalibor topic]

On 05.08.2016 19:21, Dan Smith wrote:
> I'll point out that there remains an assumption in the mentoring model you describe that, ultimately, helpful contributors will be coders.

Yes.

You can sometimes hear the siren song of "free labor" lurking just 
around the corner to do some non-code related work or other [0] in 
exchange for having some barrier to entry lowered.

It doesn't quite work that way: You get the community you advertise for. 
If your project is about code, you'll get the kind of people who care 
about code.

If your project is about more than code, then you also get the kind of 
people who care about other things, such as if you have a cool enough 
logo, or an adequate Pokemon Go clan to represent your Project, or your 
response to some random guy's blog post, or whatever it is that's 
current on their attention span roller coaster that day.

The problem you encounter over time is that people who like code tend to 
like to spend time with it uninterrupted, because it's often enough hard 
work. At the same time, people who care more about other stuff than 
code, tend to communicate more about the non-code things they care about.

That can lead to an unhealthy imbalance, where the attention seeking 
behavior is visibly rewarded with attention, while silent, steady work 
on code is not visibly rewarded as much. It causes frustrations for 
everyone down the road, as ultimately you have to ship working code to 
users, not advocacy, t-shirts, etc.

That's not just a hypothetical problem - Bacon outlines his experiences 
with it as the Ubuntu Community Manager in [1]. You can find echoes of 
it in the many, many "open source burnout" blogs published in the past 
few years.

Basically, you can either go down the path of the siren song of the free 
labor pool of non-coders, and then have to publicly "fire" the net 
negative contributors later, once you discover that they are causing 
more problems than their non-code contributions are worth, or you can 
make it clear that you mostly care about code contributions, and avoid 
having to frustrate some non-code contributors after they had sunk their 
time and effort into their lavish labors of love.

I think the latter approach is preferable as it sets clearer 
expectations on all sides.

cheers,
dalibor topic

[0] Advocacy! T-Shirts! Blogs! Translations! Logos! Ideas! Lots of 
great, free ideas, free of burdens of experience and rich with novelty!

[1] https://opensource.com/life/15/3/how-to-fire-community-members

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