The EA movement is chock-full of people who are good at programming. What about open-sourcing the EA source code and outsourcing development of new features to volunteer members who want to contribute?
Not sure what the disagree votes are about, but I agree that it would be nice to have more open source contributors! 😊 The Forum codebase is already open source and we do occasionally get contributions. We also have a (disorganized) list of issues that people can work on. IMO it’s not the easiest codebase to dive into, and we don’t have much capacity to assist people in getting set up, but now that LLM tools are much better I could imagine it being not too onerous to contribute.
If anyone wants to help, I’m happy to suggest issues for you! 🙂 Feel free to reach out to me.
On one hand, I’m very supportive of more people doing open-source development on things like this.
On the other, I think some people might think, “It’s open-source, and our community has tech people around. Therefore, people could probably do the maintenance work for free.”
From experience, it’s incredibly difficult to actually get useful open-source contributors, especially for long-term maintenance of apps that aren’t extraordinarily interesting and popular. So it can be a nice thing to encourage, but a tiny part of the big-picture strategic planning.
Great point — this matches my intuition, but I’ve never participated in any serious open source projects, so I wasn’t sure how feasible it would actually be to get useful contributions. I’ve volunteered to help with a few coding projects in the past, and most of the time I quickly lose motivation to work on them. So I expect most volunteers to also get bored/distracted and not do anything useful.
The EA movement is chock-full of people who are good at programming. What about open-sourcing the EA source code and outsourcing development of new features to volunteer members who want to contribute?
Not sure what the disagree votes are about, but I agree that it would be nice to have more open source contributors! 😊 The Forum codebase is already open source and we do occasionally get contributions. We also have a (disorganized) list of issues that people can work on. IMO it’s not the easiest codebase to dive into, and we don’t have much capacity to assist people in getting set up, but now that LLM tools are much better I could imagine it being not too onerous to contribute.
If anyone wants to help, I’m happy to suggest issues for you! 🙂 Feel free to reach out to me.
I was thinking of Disagreeing.
On one hand, I’m very supportive of more people doing open-source development on things like this.
On the other, I think some people might think, “It’s open-source, and our community has tech people around. Therefore, people could probably do the maintenance work for free.”
From experience, it’s incredibly difficult to actually get useful open-source contributors, especially for long-term maintenance of apps that aren’t extraordinarily interesting and popular. So it can be a nice thing to encourage, but a tiny part of the big-picture strategic planning.
Great point — this matches my intuition, but I’ve never participated in any serious open source projects, so I wasn’t sure how feasible it would actually be to get useful contributions. I’ve volunteered to help with a few coding projects in the past, and most of the time I quickly lose motivation to work on them. So I expect most volunteers to also get bored/distracted and not do anything useful.