Honestly the best way would be to start coding by yourself. While trying to find solutions you might find the right people too.

Almost every dev has its own ideas and ideals. There is no lack of ideas but everytime a big lack of time and men power. Software developers have more too much on the plate then too less.

So sharing ideas is nice but contributing is gold.

I would call it the FOSS Dev Paradox.

I’m afraid it doesn’t work this way. Developers generally don’t have a shortage of ideas or problems to solve. People suggest ideas all the times. Usually they have no idea if it’s super difficult to implement or already a solved problem. And if people do the programming in their spare time: They need to be involved or personally motivated somehow. So you need to find people who also want it.

My advice is: Find out where those people mingle, who would have some personal motivation or involvement with your topic of interest. That is the right place to ask. My personal oppinion: Feel free to also spam the internet and places like this with your idea. I’m a proponent of “Don’t ask to ask, just ask”. People can always not read your post or can guide you into some direction. It’s probably okay if you do it a few times too many. Just don’t ask in a hundred places at once and then don’t read the replies. If you’re better than that, you’re fine.

I’m glad people want to conribute. But everybody has ideas.

You have to realise that “contributing an idea” for developers without any of your own work sounds awfully lot like asking people to work for you for free. That is not going to make you popular in FOSS circles. Most FOSS projects are undermanned as-is and maintaining is a thankless task.

Like others have said, the best way would be to just start coding it yourself. People see you put work into something, they can get more excited about it. Advertising is fine, but unless you have something to show, it’s unlikely to attract much attention.

There is a reason “a platform where regular people can suggest FOSS ideas to developers” doesn’t really exist. We have our own ideas, which take more time than we have already. A platform such as that would likely be full of people throwing out ideas and close to zero developers willing to work on them.

Software development is a huge amount of work and the idea makes up maybe a 1/10 of a percent of the whole work. Every dev has more than enough ideas, what they are lacking is time to develop all of that.

Telling a dev about your great idea is usually similar to going to Mercedes and telling them your great idea, which is that they should make a green Ferrari with six wheels and a cardboard roof.

a) They got enough to do, they don’t require additional ideas

b) Ideas from non-devs are usually super high level (“make a Ferrari”), leave out anything that would make them worthwhile but instead include a lot of unfeasible details

Don’t take this offensive, it is not meant offensive.

But I have had so many people (mainly those with a business degree) tell me about the great ideas they had on the toilet. Most often with a “if you implement it, you can have 30% of the profit”. And of all of these ideas that non-IT people told me, I have yet to hear one that would be worthwhile implementing.

open source ideas.

You can also complement it by adding a bounty on rysolv (which can show the most funded issues.

FOSS developer here. I would love a platform where users and developers can describe their needs, pledge to support or contribute projects, build teams, showcase new projects. The current “build it and they will come” model is not working well.

The difficult part would be managing the community and curating the contents.

Software development is a huge amount of work and the idea makes up maybe a 1/10 of a percent of the whole work. Every dev has more than enough ideas, what they are lacking is time to develop all of that.

Telling a dev about your great idea is usually similar to going to Mercedes and telling them your great idea, which is that they should make a green Ferrari with six wheels and a cardboard roof.

a) They got enough to do, they don’t require additional ideas

b) Ideas from non-devs are usually super high level (“make a Ferrari”), leave out anything that would make them worthwhile but instead include a lot of unfeasible details

Don’t take this offensive, it is not meant offensive.

But I have had so many people (mainly those with a business degree) tell me about the great ideas they had on the toilet. Most often with a “if you implement it, you can have 30% of the profit”. And of all of these ideas that non-IT people told me, I have yet to hear one that would be worthwhile implementing.

AFAIK, nothing focused exclusively on “giving ideas”. If your idea is for free software, there is nothing stopping you from just writing it here and letting people talk about it.

Testing sorry

This is honestly a topic about which I’m a little conflicted.

There is definitely an extent to which programmers hold power that non-programmers don’t. One could to some extent say the same about artists or other kinds of engineers, but I don’t think to the same extent. And I think that power imbalance between programmers and non-programmers is a bad thing that we should work to reduce. (I also think there are “bad ways” to remove that power imbalance, but that feels like a whole different conversation.) For that reason, places for non-programmers to talk about FOSS they’d like to have seems like a positive thing

But I do see some potential problems with this:

• Most programmers hold a day job and have to ration their free time pretty strictly. If I’m going to take on a side project, it’s going to be hard to motivate myself to work on something for someone else rather than something for myself.
• I probably wouldn’t personally do it for extra money unless that money was enough to quit my day job basically forever while also providing big company employer job security rather than startup job security.
• The process of making software that does what the client wants involves a lot of long-term interaction between client and programmers. If you’re envisioning a place where you can casually drop an idea and somebody messages you a few months later with “here it is”, you’re going to end up with something very different from what you envisioned.
• This is not intended to insult anyone, but non-programmers don’t typically have the ability to think in the terms necessary to develop a cohesive and internally-consistent model of what they want nor communicate that model to programmers.
• If you’re not in software engineering, it’s possible you don’t know the really good reasons why what you’d suggest may be infeasible or a bad idea. In tech startups, the worst kind of clients are “ideas guys with funding” who think “Facebook but for… uh… realtors! Yeah, realtors!” is a revolutionary idea that will change the world. (100% true story, that happened to me, by the way.) Of course, that story’s about startups, not about FOSS projects, but I’m not sure we wouldn’t run into similar issues with “people with good ideas for FOSS” as with “people with good ideas for tech startups.”

Again, I think some way to give non-programmers the ability to have more influence in the tech sphere (and particularly on FOSS) is a great thing, but I feel like it’s a way bigger conversation than just “a place to suggest FOSS ideas to developers.”