Praveen Arimbrathodiyil

Bridging gaps in Free Software experience - a new experiment to let users drive development and its challenges

Traditionally the freedom to modify the software is practiced by programmers and non technical users contribute to non development aspects like documentation, publicity, translations etc. Because developers share improvements users benefit from it even if they cannot improve by themselves. This sometimes creates gaps in expectations of both developers and users. User requests may be ignored by developers and developers may feel users are putting unreasonable pressure on them.

We are trying a different approach in Prav (https://prav.app) and DEPHCOM (https://codema.in/dephcom). In these projects users propose changes and priority is decided through popular vote. Higher priority tasks are then crowd funded and developers implementing it are paid for their work.

The biggest challenge is finding the right people to do the work. Many times people who can potentially work is not able to find time or they are unwilling to learn a different programming language. One possible way out is convincing developers to think beyond their favorite programming language.