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.”