Yesterday was the day! I started to share my MVP (minimal viable product) project The Resistance Toolkit with the world. I put out posts asking for feedback and to gauge interest.
TL;DR description of The Resistance Toolkit: the project outlines a process of finding a cause, taking an action, recovering, and the repeating. (See Opensource Toolkit to Resist Hate for my full write up about the project.)
So, how did it go? Eh, ok. I posted here on Dev.to, BlueSky, and to various subreddits. It got some traction, all positive, but not much. Which is ok. I expected that, I don't have a huge following on social media to fall back on. But I did get some interesting and important findings from the limited response though.
A Funny Thing Happened On The Road To Launch...
1) People were happy to comment even though they had obviously not actually looked at the project.
The first comment I got on a post was a suggestion to use markdown
for nice formatting. I found this funny because the entire project
only contains markdown files. 😅
This interaction made me think about the call to action in my posts. It's important to be clear about what you are asking for and what you expect in your messaging.
2) The formatting of my project was too long and cumbersome.
Another type of comment I got were suggestions to include content that was already present in the project.
This indicated to me that people were landing on the project homepage, skimming the introduction, and then going back to my post to comment. I know from my time in marketing that the average time a user spends on a webpage is around 52 seconds (and that depends on the type of page, it could be as little as ~20 seconds).
That is great user research! I have now re-formatted my project so that each step of the process is on a separate page. This keeps the landing page short and sweet, and allows for better focus on each individual step. Each section also needs to have a clear call to action to move to the next step.
3) People were opinionated about hosting it on GitHub
This one took me a little by surprise. I got comments that my project shouldn't be hosted on GitHub because "GitHub is for code". This was interesting because sites like GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket are merely cloud platforms for git. Git is a version control system, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with code. Just keeping track of files.
I think it's fair to say that GitHub is also essentially the defacto home of Open Source. It's important to me that this project is open sourced because my goal is to foster a community of people passionate and active in developing and maintaining it.
Now, my hope is that if this MVP version proves useful to people that I will develop a fully fledged application. But this is the fastest and most inclusive way that I know of to develop and test this type of project. So on GitHub it shall stay!
Good Night, and Good Luck
This has been a great learning experience, and I hope you are encouraged to put your projects out there! It's easy for developers to sit at our desks and design something, but then never put it out into the world.
I would also like to encourage you to check out The Resistance Toolkit and see if it helps you take action against hate. I have created a few issues asking for help and feedback, and will be creating more as I continue development.
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