People who are new to any established open source project are often bewildered and confused by the complexity of it all. Questions come up naturally:
- Where do I start?
- What needs doing?
- How can I contribute?
- How do I contact people?
There are many ways you can contribute to an OSE project, but the best place to start is to get registered. Create accounts on the forum and wiki tools. The Get Involved page can help you with this. Then, fill out the Team Culturing Survey to describe yourself and your skills. Please consider becoming a True Fan to help support the work we do.
OSE work is organized into projects. Right now, most of these project are focused on designing and building the Global Village Construction Set, but other projects are emerging as well. To help ease into contributing to a project, we’ve created a Guide to OSE Projects page that explains how to choose a project, how to join a project, and a bit about project leadership. Think about the skills and experience you have to offer and communicate it to the project manager of a project you are interested in working on. You can also have a look at the Project Needs page to see what things are actively being sought.
It may be that the project you want to work on hasn’t started yet or is dormant from previous activity. Depending on your level of commitment, you may be interested in Starting an OSE Project. This page describes how OSE projects are organized and what it takes to make a project proposal and start one up. Before you decide to take on a GVCS project, give some thought to the time commitment you are making. You’ll be called on to organize information, create and assign tasks to team members, keeping things on track, coordinate development activities, communicate status, and a host of other things. Some of these things are described in Managing an OSE Project. Warnings aside, OSE needs your help to accomplish the goals we’ve set for ourselves.
Still feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry. You can ask questions in the OSE Forums or the chat room we’ve set up on freenode.com. The room name is “#opensourceecology”.
– Mark
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