We've had many discussions around non-code contributors at the ASF - both overall and to our various projects. Many projects in particular have a difficult time in attracting contributors to help with larger project work, like logos, marketing, events, documentation, and the like.
At Community Over Code Minneapolis, we had a variety of specific ideas for improving the non-coder experience at the ASF, so here's a start of brainstorming ideas that can be refined individually. Volunteers expected. Please keep this document focused on brainstorming; implementation ideas (and issues or problems) should go into a focused document or mail thread.
Non-coders often don't see examples of people like themselves, so it's harder for them to conceptualize actually engaging.
What if: we added an attribute to committer accounts that was a flair badge (much like reddit). Committers self-select their flair. Flair badges are selected from a curated list, and the flairs focus on non-code committers, like "Docs", "Graphics", "Design" or the like.
Code-committers are already celebrated by our culture and ecosystems; what if the ASF had an organizational way that our exisitng committers could self-select a flair that explicitly celebrates non-code stuff.
How/where would we display this flair? How could non-code newcomers discover and get inspired by these?
What if we had a formal "Contributor" role, that newcomers who have actually contributed someting to a project, and wants to continue working, but hasn't been voted as a committer (and perhaps hasn't signed an ICLA).
How would we formally sign up newcomers to become a "Contributor"? Would they get an ASF ID (that does not have commit privs)? Would they get an email address? Would a PMC need to endorse this, or could any random newcomer try to self-sign-up?
How could we name this role, and publicise it, to make it clear to non-code people that the ASF welcomes and values their contributions?
Many projects have ways to recognize or promote non-code contributors, including people doing ecosystem awareness, events, and all sorts of other positive work around their project.
How can we take existing examples, especially intro docs on project websites, and then use those to both help other projects as well as the ASF as a whole?
What if we had ComDev volunteers go out and find these examples, do a short interview wit ha PMC member, and then write a ComDev blog post (or similar) that says "hey, Airflow has this amazing model for running events, here's how they do it". Separately: how could we more actively take these best practices to other projects that might not know about them (but likely would benefit from that idea).
"Committer" is often seen as a technical term that is focused on code contributions; this name often doesn't apply to - and certainly appeal to - non-coders.
What are words or titles we can create instead of "Committer", maybe that's more than "Contributor" (because contributor often seems to mean someone doing drive-by or small contributions, not people who have status or long-term investment in a project.