From: Lyle Johnson <lyle.johnson@...>
Date: 2007-02-07T00:06:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Community involvement

On 2/6/07, Tech Guy <technodolt@gmail.com> wrote:

> What I want to know is: how do I become part of this core community?  Right
> now I feel like I'm sitting on the outside, watching all this amazing
> development going on, and I have no idea how to get involved myself.  I'd
> like to become part of a project and lend my time and as-yet meager
> abilities back to the community that's helped me out so much, but I don't
> have any idea where to start at.  Should I try to become involved in a
> rubyforge project?  Should I just hunt down some random project's Trac and
> start making fixes and submitting them?

I wouldn't say you should hunt down some "random" project to
contribute to, but yeah, if there's a particular Ruby-related project
that really interests you, ask how you can help. If you're a good
writer, ask if you can help write some documentation for the project;
I can almost guarantee with 100% accuracy that the answer to that
question will be "Yes". When you discover a bug, or a potential bug,
in a library, don't just send a terse message to the mailing list
saying "It's broken" -- submit a *good* bug report that tells how to
reproduce the problem, providing sample code whenever possible. (Even
better, submit a patch that fixes the problem).

As the Ruby community has grown over the last year or so, there has
been a large influx of people who are glad to take but not especially
interested in giving back. It's good to hear from someone like you who
doesn't fall into that group.

> Is there a place where people can go to recruit others for their projects?

There's the "Project Openings" (a.k.a. Help Wanted) section at RubyForge,

    https://rubyforge.org/people/

although that's not very widely used.