Revision as of 00:59, 23 October 2010

People often ask how they can get involved and contribute to MeeGo. This is meant to help guide new community members into productive contributions as part of the MeeGo project.

Overview

We want to see people contributing to the MeeGo project, and there are many ways to contribute. As with any open source project, being helpful with some concrete contributions will demonstrate to the project maintainers that you are serious about contributing, which helps us separate the people who talk about contributing from the people who contribute in a meaningful way to the project. This builds trust in your work, and the people who consistently contribute good work will be given more and more responsibility. Examples include Reggie who maintains our forums, our many community localization experts who have access to make changes to translations, and others who have been given special roles and privileges as a result of their contributions to the project. Ideally, we want to see more people outside of Intel and Nokia taking on key maintainer roles and other official roles in the project.

Small contributions will lead to bigger roles in the project, so find an area that best fits with your interests and skills and get started with some contributions. Here are some concrete suggestions for how to get involved in MeeGo today.

Non-Technical Contributions

• MeeGo Greeter: Join the MeeGo Greeters to help new people get started with MeeGo.
• Wiki Improvements: Browse this wiki and look at the recent changes to make improvements to content in the wiki. This could include correcting mistakes in the content or cleaning up the language / grammar to make it easier to read.
• Use MeeGo and file bugs: You don't need to be technical to file a bug. You just need to be able to use MeeGo and find things that aren't working. To submit a bug, you just need to be able to reproduce the issue and include steps for how you found the error. I did x, y, and then z, and now a does b instead of c. No knowledge of how to fix it or why you are getting the error is required in the bug report. Keep in mind that more technical people can add additional details later or re-categorize a bug that wasn't submitted correctly. Do your best to fill in the information you have, and don't worry if you don't have everything.
• Voting and commenting on bugs is also helpful.
• Forum Triage: Help people in the forums who have general questions. We get a lot of people asking the same questions over and over. For example, if you see people asking these questions about MeeGo for netbooks, we have ready made answers for them.
• Task Lists: The Community Office also maintains a list of committed and proposed tasks. You can propose a new task based on something that you think needs to be done, or contact the owner of a committed task and volunteer to help.
• MeeGo FAQ: We have a collection of MeeGo FAQ documents, and we can always use help finding commonly asked questions and answers.
• Promote the MeeGo Project: Tell your friends, blog about MeeGo, and find other ways to help people learn about MeeGo.

Technical Contributions

• Contribute Code: Contribute patches to MeeGo to add functionality, fix a bug or make other improvements to MeeGo. See our contribution guidelines for more details.
• Contribute Tests: Contribute tests to reproduce bugs and to test features of MeeGo. See our contribution guidelines for more details. MeeGo tests are stored in version control like code.
• Technical Documentation on the Wiki: Contribute to technical documentation on the wiki. We have quite a few wiki pages with placeholders or outdated information. Search for things in your area of technical expertise and help us fill in the blanks. Or create new wiki pages with best practices, tips and tricks or other information that would help people working on MeeGo.
• Help with Bugs: Browse through our bugs and help out by filing bugs or adding more detail to bugs that you have also experienced. Or better yet, fix some bugs and submit patches.
• Forum Triage: Provide support in the forums by looking for unanswered questions and helping us answer them.
• Develop Applications for MeeGo: Start using Qt to write an app or port an app to MeeGo. If Dawn can write a hello world style app for MeeGo, anyone can. We're still working on the garage and other app stores, but we want to have a great application ecosystem around MeeGo, so now is a good time to start.
• Help reviewing changes to MeeGo: Help review the changes going into the MeeGo OS at the meego-commits mailing list.
• Participate in technical meetings: Some MeeGo teams run public meetings which you can attend, check the Meeting IRC schedule

Additional Information

• View our Community Office task lists
• Attend our Community Office/Meetings to learn about other ways to help with MeeGo.

Notes on Contributing to MeeGo

Since MeeGo is an open source project, everyone who contributes in some way is a member of the MeeGo community. This includes people from Intel, Nokia, Novell, other companies, translators, hobbyists, and interested people unaffiliated with any company. We are all working together as a community to make MeeGo as awesome as it can possibly be. We want to get everyone working together as part of a large community working toward the same goal of having an amazing operating system and application ecosystem for small form factor devices.

Over time as people prove themselves through solid contributions, we want to see more people on the governance pages who don't work for Intel and Nokia leading significant areas of the MeeGo project. Getting everyone working together regardless of their corporate affiliation is the first step to having a successful MeeGo community. Yes, this takes a little time and hard work, but starting now with your contributions to MeeGo will get us there.