Do you need to be a programmer to contribute to open source projects?

A common misconception is that only programmers can contribute to open source project. Being a programmer of course make it possible for you to make changes to the source code of the application, but there are tons of other things that need to be done in a project. Especially if it is a large, end-user facing project such as Firefox, VLC, Moodle, or mdbook.

A few of the areas where one can help:

• QA - Quality Assurance. There is always a need to help checking the quality of these open source projects.
• Someone needs to act as the product manager trying to understand what the users would like to have and if that's something the product should actually do.
• Someone needs to provide customer support.
• Someone needs to write documentation.
• Maybe there is a need for creating "marketing material". That could be a nice web site for the project, a logo, nice images etc.
• There is also a need to help with fundraising. Many open source projects and many open source developers could do a lot more if they got some payment for their time.