Community Without Code

This is the seventh in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

In the final session on the first day, I attended a speech about how to contribute to the open source community without being a coder. This was not exactly what the speaker talked about, but it was interesting anyway.

He spoke in completely plain language about contributing to any open source project, including what first timers needed to know about GitHub. In addition, he recommended that non-coders use social media and blogs to promote projects that work, and that meetups and conferences were great ways to get involved.

If I have one criticism of the conference, it was that their “101” track still supposed that we were all hard-core back end developers with massive experience in the open source community. Hopefully next year, they’ll take the “101” idea to the next level and encourage speakers to develop sessions for those of us who really are beginners.