[rossdavidh]

So, it seems like there is a potential way for a non-dev user to help out with open source, here. Basically, if a person volunteers to be an intermediary, reading the feedback and distilling it down to the relevant content (stripping out the unproductive negativity), that could be useful. It would also be emotionally easier to read harsh feedback, when it's not about _your_ work, just the work of a product you use. Many open source projects have plenty of non-dev users, who cannot really help out currently, but some of them might be willing to if shown a good entry point.

Again, they wouldn't be blocking the feedback, just distilling it down to the most relevant part (e.g. "your piece of sh*t update broke the f#$King feature I depend on for my work!" becomes "newest update caused a regression in this menu item").

Just an idea.

[folex]

While the idea is good and kind, it's not as easy as it seems.

That's called a support line, and it requires good understanding of the project by non-dev support. That requires to educate someone about your project, and maintain their knowledge to be up to date.

That's not an easy task even in commercial projects with a team of several people, and ability to delegate, and requires a non-trivial skill of leadership.

In other words, the project is very lucky to have such people. And while it sometimes happen organically, it's hard to implement this intentionally.

[shittyadmin]

They don't necessarily need full knowledge of the product or any such thing, they just need to be able to provide a sort of filter, remove anything uselessly abusive or congratulatory without value, open defects for obvious bugs with reproduction instructions and get users to dig in and provide useful details when asking questions.

Those questions can then be answered directly by them or forwarded off to a dev who will have more detail and be able to get answers faster without the drudge of dealing with the rest of it.

Personally while working at a small company and doing both support and development work, I found it helpful to simply tell customers we'd address issues "with the development team" even when that meant I was going to work on it. Drawing that line in the sand between support and development roles compartmentalize those activities and reduces the immediacy of demand from users.

[rossdavidh]

I'm sure it's not easy, but... 1) a support line offers support to the end user, which is different; I'm talking about filtering out the emotion from the content 2) most people who could do this, do not know that they could, that there is a need, or how one would volunteer to do it 3) the same person would not have to process all feedback, just as much as they have time for; at least some of the pile of feedback would be processed by someone other than a dev 4) the non-technical nature of the person is actually helpful, because that is usually where the originator of the feedback is coming from, and the job of this person would not be to determine the fix, but only to separate content from emotionally motivated criticism

[fjp]

I have help multiple roles that could be called "very technical support" - technical enough to understand the guts of a project, troubleshoot, deflect reports that are just user error, report bugs on behalf of users with extra debugging insight, etc... but not technical enough to contribute meaningfully to the source code.

That job is just as exhausting and unrewarding as any support role. There's no fucking way I would do it for free on open source software that wasn't my own creation. EDIT: Unless it was a definite path to being a core contributor to a project I was very passionate about.

[kingosticks]

In theory it's a great idea but I think in practice very few people want to do that (or anything). In the same way that non-dev users could help with translating documentation etc but very rarely do. As it happens I recently had a guy translate our documentation into Catalan and he's just started on Spanish - but it's the first time I've been offered that sort of help in 6 years.

[rossdavidh]

You are no doubt correct, but I could easily believe that 1% of people would be willing to, but don't know that there is a need, or how to volunteer for it if they did. Also, a system for crowdsourcing this, with "crowd" being minimally vetted volunteers, so that maybe you can't get everything but you could do 5% of the total.