The team behind Kubernetes has given a big hug to people who may never have written a line of code but still want to wear their T-shirt with pride with a “non-code contributors guide”.

Open source projects love to highlight the number of contributors they have, while many techies can’t wait to tell you about much code they’ve contributed to significant projects.

In a blog post last week Kubernetes luminaries Noah Abrahams, Jonas Rosland, and Ihor Dvoretskyi, recounted how back in May at Kubecon discussions suggested “the idea that the community was not benefiting as much as it could from the many people who wanted to contribute, but whose strengths were in areas other than writing code.”

The result was a “NonCode Contributors Guide” which “aims to make it easy for anyone to contribute to the Kubernetes project in a way that makes sense for them. This can be in many forms, technical and non-technical, based on the person’s knowledge of the project and their available time.”

The Guide, unsurprisingly, is detailed on GitHub, and runs through a non-exhaustive stack of ways people can contribute to Kubernetes, without having to contribute code. This includes getting involved in Community education, running meet-ups and helping organise events. They also suggest getting involved in “volunteer management” including helping find and funnel contributors to the right special interest or working groups.

If you want to get even closer to the core, there is a “Non-Code Tasks in Primarily-Code roles” section, which includes the possibility of working on documentation and release notes, and helping with GitHub management.

In fact, helping out on documentation and release notes comes up throughout the list, almost as if there’s a recognition that this is one area where the full time code cutters could really do with some help.

Best of all, the list is described as “ever growing”. So, if you’ve got ideas of how people can contribute without delivering a word of code, you can…contribute as much as you want,  without actually contributing code.

Kubernetes is not unique in soliciting non-code contributors. The Jenkins’ project for example mentions the importance of non-code contributors, including those who “Like breaking/testing software”.

However, the received wisdom is that while project leaders make the right noises,  this rarely translates into real action.