I resumed one thousand of my words!
My point about the ECA, is, how we as community, can work together, to avoid these issues? To make value into the long term, and give part of this value back to the community?
But that is “exactly” what @olamide_shodunke has done over the years with code and app contributions.
The foundation failed to garner any support and yet it was supposed to be officially part of the core team. I am not sure how you generate a different take on the same team effort. I like the concept, but I do not know how you would ever structure it to get the attention of the core developers.
Unless you generate a like minded team of paying “frappe partners” to have a larger voice in the echo chamber of the current development group.
BKM
@bkm, I personally didnt know the work of @olamide_shodunke
I knew this, but the idea, so, after that what’s left to support the community, except the community?
- Probably, having a place where everyone else, can register they custom apps
- Having a small group of entusiasts that can put some effort to help others in how to make they apps more realiable, more secure, more maintenable, into the long term
- Having a small group of entusiasts that can put some effort to listen the more important issues raised by the community, and can point attention to these tasks.
It doesn’t worked with foundation, that was under Frappé umbrella, did you think it will work again? (I mean having a group of paying people)
Totally agree. seems I got to fix my reported issues by myself other than waiting other developer to do it. even though get one PR merged is always hard.
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I agree to this. The current basic mode should be “if it’s already there, don’t remove it”.
And I think this is the way a monolith should be developed. Built big-comprehensive-all-batteries-included system. Then when a user doesn’t need a feature or a module the system should provide a way to disable or turn it off.
It’s like building a full-furnished house. Throw away what you don’t like.
i.e: ERPNext way.
As oppose, the platform way of development. The platform is minimal but having all the hooks and api for add-ons to be added.
Like an empty house. Buy and build your own needs.
i.e: Odoo way.
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this would be amazing. Maybe a defacto built-in dashboard like plotly as well
That’s exactly the reason I agree with you that a better organized community could be so important.
Browsing these forums, or even just this thread, we can see a wide range of opinions about “what should be next”. There is no coherent voice, and that makes the process of dialog difficult for everyone. I understand why people get frustrated when PRs take forever to get merged (or don’t get merged at all), but I’ve also been on the other side and know that understanding somebody else’s code can take as much time or more than writing it yourself. As a community driving contributions together, it would be much easier for everyone to maintain a productive dialog.
I know that this was tried before, but in my opinion it was just too much too fast. If I recall correctly, there were team leaders for each module and a number of ambitious initiatives for big new functions. That kind of delegation works for similar projects like Drupal or Moodle, but they have development communities ten or a hundred times larger than what we have here.
I’d encourage us to think about something much more modest: a dozen folks, working together, to think through community needs a bit more broadly than we currently can as individuals.
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I think we have been here multiple times. Here is the simple answer:
Build trust. Contribute small fixes. Get involved in code reviews. Help write tests
Many times the maintainers have been burnt by contributors who have no long term commitment to the project and end up cleaning their mess over and over again.
All the development is public and we are even publishing roadmaps. Don’t complain. Be helpful.
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@rmehta can you define your definition of “trust”?
I know it’s not much, but did it really works?
How?
It’s not a complain, I fell that discuss is an open place for ideas, and that divergent ideas are welcomed.
I wrote, to explain my experience with a community member, in the last years.
In my background I have helped others, without ask anything in charge, like I said to you before, in one of our discussions, “Everything has a price, even an open-source has a price, and the price I can pay, is help others in good faith!”
And I’m not complaining by the work of ERPNext team, instead I’m telling, what I fell, us as a community, we need to work more, and together, to help others, to follow your words.
Because, to me, is uncertain and unclear the path that should be followed to achieve the goals defined in your sentence.
And more important, it doesnt answer my initial question
The limits of do-ocracy: FLOSS often follows the model of power for those who do. To earn power, one must contribute code. It works, but there’s a limit: how to represent the needs of users of the software who aren’t able to contribute code? #citationneeded
—
Luciano Ramalho
(@ramalhoorg) May 11, 2021
Also, with a clear path in how to build your meaning of trust, everyone else in this community, including who is unable to code, will be able to follow.
I’m open to write an guidance, and to help others understand what is expected from they in this jorney, but, first I need to understand what’s expected!
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The way to contribute is that if you find an issue, you send a fix. < 10 contributions in the last 3 years is not good enough to bring any kind of equity on the table.
@revant_one and @snv have found their niches in contributing and they have been given write access to the core repos (check their contributions).
Frappe devs are already struggling with whatever expectations there are from users and community. At this point, there are many entry points for someone who wants to help. Sometimes you may have to ping people personally to get some attention, but by and large if your contributions are good and follow the guidelines, (tests, documentation, PR explanation etc) they should be accepted.
Edit: Overall if you don’t feel like empathising with the current maintainers, by all means please start your own community and start contributions.
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So you got your answer @max_morais_dmm
As far as @rmehta is concerned the way to get the community built is to provide fixes:
As you can see there is NO representation for your concept of:
This developer team does not have any non-coders and does not know how to respond to them. So, the only contributions that are considered are those that provide the code to fix an issue and all of the supporting documentation and testing to validate. That is it. That is all.
This sentiment has been expressed many times in the forum.
I am sorry max, but unless the make-up of the core team were to change, (or their ideals were to change) I do not see a way to have the non-coder community represented. This pretty much makes the ERPNext community a community of ONLY developers. I just think that distorts the the business viewpoint the project is supposed to enhance and support.
This is how open source projects become abandonware. If the target user is not involved in the design or upgrade aspects of the project, it tends to wander off on tangents that does not ultimately help the user base, but merely caters to the developer whims. This is likely how we end up with tons of new features and really no in-depth work to fully develop any features beyond their initial introductions.
Once a developer has checked the new feature off their bucket list, they look for the next feature challenge to build out their portfolio of developer accomplishments. Nobody goes back to actually build any real-world use cases into the skeleton of a feature left behind after it is first introduced.
I contend this is the EXACT same thing that @rmehta describes here:
The difference is that it is the very developers that claim to be burned that are in fact burning their users in much the same way. They develop only the beginnings of a feature and get it into the core, then never revisit it. IT is left there to give false hope to a user community that it will ever become a full feature.
How is that any different form the complaint that developers are unable to support fixes that the PR submitter have no “log term commitment to” ??
In my estimation it is exactly the same thing. It just depends on which side of the ever widening abyss you happen to be standing on.
This is why @max_morais_dmm I question the viability of enhancing the user community. It will always be met with the retort of “Provide PR fixes that are ready to merge in order to contribute.”
That has always been the answer, and that has always set the parameters for the growing abyss.
Non-coders need not apply.
BKM
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I have previously invited @bkm to share and contribute to documentation but makes no sense to keep repeating the stuff.
But hey, I have no entitlement on your labour and neither have you any entitlement on our labour. Instead of showing some gratitude, you choose to rant. Fine.
We reap what we sow. The records are out there for everyone to see. If ERPNext fails it’s on us.
Happy to work with contributors who are ready to contribute on our (current maintainers) terms.
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@bkm I got the answer, and I fell there’s viability of enhancing the user community, I personally share many of your toughts on the last answer.
I need now, sit, revise all answers here, and the guidance that @rmehta have gave-me.
I probably I’ll need ping the developers that Rushabh pointed me, to talk with they, and understand how they are working into the “Contribution Guidelines”.
The community we already have, and I don’t want to break this community, and I personally don’t have problems with the current maintainers job, I understand they focus.
The subject here, is a point for the whole community, including me, that we need to work together, to address our needes, improving the community, and the product also.
I end up here, with my home lessons to do, and my sincerelly appologies, if in the middle of my knowlege discoveral, I have been rude, or I missed with respect with anyone in this community.
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No, you are not at all being rude. You are only wishing the community to become the “ideal” community of both developers and users. Unfortunately, that is not how this community seems to be structured.
If anything, they are being rude to you.
As if to only further place an exclamation point on the points I made about the differences between users and developers, @rmehta has further driven the point home and likely served to further divide the community into the “haves” (developers) and the “have-nots” (business users) with this stinging remark:
So the average business looking to adopt ERPNext as a business management tool, must have on staff developers or be able to pay for developers to do their bidding.
I do not think the community is a bad one. It is just the community that has a focus on the development aspect of the project and not necessarily the usefulness aspect of it (unless you can contribute the code to enhance or fix it).
As you can see from the reply by the head of the developer team here, they are a bit sensitive to being called out for the truth of the matter. They think that community members like myself do not appreciate the work they have done in building the project. They get that part completely wrong because they are blinded by their own agendas and their desire to make their project bigger and better all the time. They miss the point of the project having to be actually useful in order to gain market traction.
So, I am not offended by their scorn. I will continue to build on the project and try to keep it viable in the eyes of users, at least as long as I can continue to pay for developers to continue to fix or fill in the gaps. But they do get a bit testy when you point out the disconnect between a developer portfolio and an actual business management package.
In for profit enterprises that build SaaS solutions, they have to focus on user acceptance and usability in order to continue to make money. In a open source project there is no such requirement and the project can then veer off into whatever makes the developers content without regard to how it is accepted by the users.
Just spend some time reading the forum here. You will find it obvious very few community members actually use the project in their businesses unless they are developers themselves or they can pay developers to fix the problems for them. The community is not structured toward the average user or non-coding implementer.
Complaining is pointless. The community is what it is. It is better to simply understand what it is and work within it if you can.
But to your last humbling reply… You are not the problem here. Your are not being rude. The community only seems rude to you because you didn’t understand it’s foundation and its driving force. Take heart. Your ideals are welcomed in the hearts of almost all users. They just may not be met with the open arms here that you would hope.
BKM
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@max_morais_dmm and @bkm I do personally appreciate your contributions to this community, I learnt a lot from you by reading a lot of threads.
As non professional programmer and with SAP background, I contributed some PRs to both Frappe and ERPNext, some finally merged into core , but more other PRs had been rejected due to lack of documentation, test case or too complicated for the framework. I did not feel frustrated PR been rejected because I understand core team’s consideration and concern.
I will continue to contribute small PRs as needed and as I can. but I do support @bkm’s idea to involve non developer for PR process.
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All of this is so sad! 
My take on this is that many of the respondents on this thread earnestly want to help. However they find it difficult to do so because they’re invariably wearing a business rather than an IT hat. Unfortunately their hat is deemed less important for the longevity of the project.
I also come from a business angle, although I can help myself ( and others : [Tutorial] Using cURL for REST and RPC API calls ) with some tech related stuff, I nevertheless find it very dis-enfranchising to read how our desire to assist is being trampled upon.
Just imagine the magnitude of the force behind ERPNext if we can somehow unite both user communities. Just image the dominance this product can have world-wide. Technically it is very well constructed, but business wise it now needs the input of business users to polish it to become that pervasive solution all of us are yearning for. The one and only obvious choice for an ERP system.
Just imagine a few years from now, when we read this post again, how we’ll silently smile, knowing we did manage to overcome this division and made ERPNext the de facto best ERP system in the world.
Just imagine how easy it actually is to unite us all.
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Non technical users can help with:
- Documentation
- Videos
- Helping new users on this forum
- Write blogs, reviews, social media
- Money
Many people are already doing this. Not sure why this accusation of “disenfranchisement”. This thread was specifically about code contributions.
Can you point out one blocker to these contributions?
Edit: This the exact kind of posturing that drives me away from this forum. Maybe I should just keep away. 
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I beg to differ. The title of this thread is “ERPNext14…What would you like to see?” The 2 overwhelming aspects discussed are Feature Fatigue and a desire for an End User Community. None of those are about code contributions. I think this cuts to the core of the matter, not all assistance is, or should be, code related. From an end user perspective, the assistance we’d like to bring to the table has nothing to do with code, or even any of the things in your list of 5. It has to do with end users and their business requirements. Things such as ease of installation, guaranteed upgrade path, feature continuity, etc. All you have to do is read this forum’s posts about the difficulty people have installing this software, not to mention the problems they face when they want to upgrade. These aspects are of paramount importance for a business, once the feature list has been ticked.
I accept that ERPNext has both a SaaS and Books offering, yet SMEs want to use ERPNext installed on their own hardware or VMs. The question you have to ask yourself is : Do I want these users to form part of my ecosystem or not?
What is crystal clear to me, from the very first post in this chain, is that end users are not interested in more features (code contributions) but would love to give you feedback as to what needs polishing, without necessarily giving you that feedback in the form of code, documentation, videos, etc. As it is, in order to compile documentation, it turns out you need to read the code to find out why something works the way it does. A classical chicken-or-egg scenario. I cannot help with documentation because I cannot read the code. Many of us do our utmost to assist on this forum, offering the experience we gained after many hours of trying things, which is not what a business user/owner want to hear, irrespective of your feature list.
What I’d like to bring to your attention is that there are many “softer” issues at play other than code. From this thread is should be clear that users are eager to contribute, just not as code, and the lack of a mechanism to do so. You could argue that I’m either missing the point of ERPNext being a FOSS project, or that a mechanism for non-code contributions does exist, etc, but I’m not the only one on this thread echoing the same sentiment. Which means that we’re all equally as wrong, or maybe we have a point…
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Can you be very specific about the kinds of contributions you would like to make and the barriers you are facing in making them?
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