Updated: 30 June, 2019 |
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openSUSE is developed in the open, and everybody can join in - this means that you can help to create and shape openSUSE. If you wish to participate actively in openSUSE or other free software projects, there are plenty of things to do. Finding something that matches your interests, available time and your skills should be no problem at all.
The first steps to getting involved is to follow the news and getting to know the community.
Consider following these sources. These and more relevant news feeds are preconfigured in the Akregator RSS-reader which is installed by default and is part of the Kontact suite:
You should also join some of the mailinglists, this is the primary form of communication for the project, -announce, -project, -kde and -factory are some of the major ones, that most would want to subscribe to:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mailing_lists
Consider hanging out in some IRC channels, where much communication and coordination takes place, as well as regular meetings.
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:IRC_list
The openSUSE project has its own social network where community members can communicate:
Of course the openSUSE community is also present on all the major social media:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/openSUSE/45393742283
https://plus.google.com/110312141834246266844/
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=61388&trk=anet_ug_hm
The openSUSE community meets regularly on different continents. This is a great opportunity to meet other community members.
This is just a brief summary of some of the areas where you can contribute while helping to shape the distribution and having a lot of fun.
Once you have familiarized yourself with openSUSE, you’ll quickly be able to help new users in the forums, IRC or mailinglists. Apart from helping others, you will learn a lot yourself in the process.
There’s a marketing team working on promoting openSUSE in various ways, which you can join or even become an official openSUSE ambassador.
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Marketing
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Ambassadors
You can buy merchandise and help market openSUSE that way:
The openSUSE wiki is always in need of new articles, or cleanup of existing ones.
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Wiki_team
Read about the documentation team here:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Documentation_team
Translate the openSUSE distribution and/or wiki to your native language. You can find a web based interface (Weblate) to translate openSUSE specific software here:
You can see an overview of the existing translation teams here:
https://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Localization_Teams
If you’re an artist you can create icons and other artwork for the distribution, marketing, websites and so forth.
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Artwork
You can help test the development versions of upcoming openSUSE releases.
You’ll find the roadmap here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Roadmap
Get the latest development version here:
http://software.opensuse.org/developer
Read this before reporting bugs:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Submitting_bug_reports
You can request new features for openSUSE here, or vote for (or against) existing requests:
There’s also an organized testing team which you can join, see:
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Testing
The availability of as many as possible, high quality binary packages is crucial for any distribution. You can build packages on the openSUSE Build Service and even maintain packages in the official distribution:
http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Build_Service
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Factory_development_model
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Development_Process
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:How_to_contribute_to_Factory
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:How_to_contribute_to_Leap
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Junior_jobs
You can also contribute to the Packman project - which provides a very important 3rd party repository with particularly multimedia - with packaging and other contributions:
http://packman.links2linux.org/
If you’re a programmer you can contribute code to fix bugs or add features e.g. in YaST or other components developed by the openSUSE project itself - and of course if you contribute code to upstream projects, openSUSE will benefit from this too - eventually. You can find the source code for various openSUSE components here in publically accessible version control systems:
openSUSE needs fast and reliable mirrors to host ISOs and repositories in all parts of the world, to ensure that users have a good experience, if you work in a university or similar, maybe you can help out.
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mirror_infrastructure
Development of free software also needs money and you can help by donating money to your favourite projects or joining some organizations, like e.g.: