Open Mail to the Lumiera Community
(Fwd. from the Piksel mailinglist, thanks Hadrian)
Dear Lumiera Community
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Lumiera is a huge project, we will depend on every possible
contribution. Sitting and waiting for other people to finish it would
bring us nowhere, and if people want to use it they will need to
consider to contributing; every little step counts. We need help, not
only with the work itself but also, we need help to cultivate a growing
community around the project. This would provide a big motivation for
everyone else, and help the project as a whole to grow and take on more
contributors. We, the main programmers, are currently overladen by all
kinds of tasks which could be very easily taken up by others!
How to become a contributor::
There is no formal application process. Anyone can just jump right in.
Propose something to do on the Mailinglist, talk to the other volunteers
on IRC about it, and you’ll find just by simply being involved, that
you’ve become a part of the team! Long term involvement would be nice
but isn’t even required, especially not for the simple or one-off tasks.
What are the requirements::
Anyone can pick a task he is capable of doing. You may need to do some
learning and study some documentation, but we offer basic help to get
you going. We’ll also help you get used to our infrastructure (git,
asciidoc) but this will not swamp your contribution. Anyone may try at
least, there is no way to mess anything up (we use git). We believe that
every step can only bring us forward.
Future vision::
Lumiera is and will always be a ‘Free Software’ project. In far future
it would be nice if it put some food on the table for the people who are
working on it, maybe by individual contracting, establish a “Lumiera
Foundation”, or just a commercial company around it. However, as a GPLd
project there will never be a closed commercial version, and an open
crippled version; this is ensured. Our vision is that Lumiera should be
a community project, even if there is some umbrella organization or
company, it’s purpose would be to support that, e.g. cover travel costs
for community members. No one will get rich, but everyone will be fairly
treated.
What needs to be done next
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Any potential helper should be willing to spend time learning how things
work. Of course, we’ll help getting started, but then, often figuring
out how to do certain stuff is almost the most important part of the job
and part of the fun. This may include reading manuals, using Google or
asking questions on support forums. We have some introduction at
http://www.pipapo.org/pipawiki/Lumiera/QuickStart (while this page
requires a makeover from some helper itself).
There are no secondary or “lesser” tasks. We value every contribution.
Improvements on documentation and infrastructure are in no way less
important than core coding. We value help there extremely highly,
because this currently sucks our time, which we, the core devs, would
prefer to spend on those tasks that only we can do right now.
Work for non programmers::
* asciidocing of all external documentation
– from pipapo.org/pipawiki/Lumiera
– from tiddlywikis
* learn git basics (we’ll help) and then help other people
getting started with those basics.
* doxygen formatting improvements
* creating overview and entry pages for documentation and API doc,
improve the structure of the documentation.
* helping with summaries, announcement texts, meeting protocols…
* website artwork and other fun tasks intentionally left out here
Simple programming (infrastructure, shell scripting)::
* uwiki help (lua coding)
* buildrone improvements
* testsuite improvements
Where to find more work
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We recently set up an issue tracker, take a look at
http://issues.lumiera.org/report/1 there you can see what needs to be
done and where help is needed. Most notably the tickets on
‘infrastructure’ tasks are often simple to moderately complex and could
be done by new contributors.
The core programming tasks notes there are not topic here, but helpers
will be greatly welcome and should talk to us on the ML or IRC.
Regards, the Lumiera Core Developers,
Christian, Hermann, Joel
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