How important is volunteer and extra-curricular?

[Dan]

allenh98 @ 5th September 2008, 6:16 pm wrote:

Where and how can i start doing open source volunteering?

First you need to find an open source organizations.

Then you need to read up on there guide lines for coding, contrubiting and get to know the community, the project and the documentation.

Next you need to find a feature that needs to be added or a bug that needs fixing, noramly you can find theses on the projects tracker, but it is also good to read up on there forums, mailing list and irc room on what the community needs and wants.

Then you download the latest source code for the project, do your changes and make a patch in what ever format they like/require.

After the patch made and you have made sure it fallows all there guide lines and tests you need to submit the patch to either there mailing list, forums or where ever they like them submitted.

If you are lucky one of the project developers will take notice and add your patch to the development version of the project.

Repate theses sets and evneutaly if your work is good and you are invoiled in the community they might give you developer access to there current version system and be a bigger part of the community.


It is imporent to rember that all open source projects are diffrent and do things diffrent so you need to read up on there guideines, rules and get to know how things work and know the community befor you start throwing patches at people. Also not all patches are acpected even if they are good, peoleop have diffrent views of how things should be or be done and althought it can be imporent to argue your point of views it is also imporent to realises that you are not the only one involed in the project or the only user of it so some times it is best to let it be and move on to a new patch or make changes so it is more acpectable to others.

[allenh98]

Thank you.

[mod edit: no need for excessive quoting]