Have you ever tried to explain to a non-techie how software development works in GitHub (with the concepts of fork, branch, pull request, merge,…)?. Not easy. To be honest, it is not that trivial to understand for a programmer either.
But this is what we needed to do as part of our participation in the JAM’17 conference, where we led the discussions around the democracy in open source projects and the governance model that the community (including everybody: users, contributors, funders,…) wanted to put in place to make decisions around the Decidim project (Decidim is a participatory democracy framework originally developed for the Barcelona City government online and offline participation website and now being used in a number of other cities and organizations).
To help everybody understanding where in a Github-based development process decisions should be made and the relevance of each decision, my colleague Javier Cánovas prepared the following infographic. Just to be clear, the goal was to make it as easy as possible to understand so we opted to highlight a simple development process, we are aware a real development process can be much more complex than this but you don’t probably want to scare your audience at the very beginning!.
(click on the image to download it with a a higher resolution)
This is great! Did you intend for their to be meaning behind the contributors with and without shirts and those in red vs those in blue? I’m thinking the blue ones with shirts are the project’s maintainers, blue without shirts are contributors, and red are from a complementary but different project. Is that the interpretation you had in mind?
Hi Kelle,
thanks for your comment. When I created the infographic the main point was to use different colors for contributors coming from different projects. Thus, blue people represent contributors of the “main” project while orange ones represent contributor of other projects.
Regarding shirts, contributors with shirts try to mean developers, while those people without shirts try to mean non-technical contributors (e.g., end-users or domain experts). This detail is difficult to describe in a written post, but when we presented the figure in public it was (I hope) more evident 🙂
Cheers