We are open to your contributions! If you have an idea, a new piece of documentation, or a patch, we want to hear about it! Below you'll find an overview of the people involved and advice on how you can contribute.

People

The OpenACS project has thousands of participants. The OpenACS Core Team provides technical direction and formal decision-making through OpenACS Improvement Proposals. In addition to the core team members there are a number of active package maintainers who are glad to help people make contributions happen.

I am Building a Website using OpenACS

Here are a couple of guidelines that we think will benefit not only your OpenACS project but the OpenACS community at large:

• Announce to the community when the project starts and who are involved. By doing this you may get immediate feedback and advice from others who have done similar projects.
• Post about your technical plans for the project so that you can exchange ideas and best practices with experienced members of the community. Review the code and packages that you are developing to see if they can be contributed back to the OpenACS project.
• Do not fork from OpenACS core so that you lose the option of upgrading in the future. This point is crucial to the long term growth potential of your project and the community at large. If you really need to customize OpenACS try to localize your changes as much as possible and separate out custom code in project specific packages. If you fork from OpenACS you lose the ability to upgrade to future versions that will be more robust and have new features and applications. You also lose some of the support and involvement in the community when forking.

  You might look into better version control systems to ensure that your local customizations are preserved (for example, see using OpenACS with Gnu Arch)

• Announce to the community when the project is finished, summarize what's been done and give appropriate credits.

I have an Idea

Please check the discussion forums (use the search) and see if your idea has been discussed before. Feel free to contribute any additional information. Bugs and feature requests should be submitted to the OpenACS Bug Tracker.

If you want your idea to be adopted, it is up to you to get support for it! The OpenACS community tends to rally fairly quickly around popular/useful ideas, so this shouldn't be too difficult.

Contributing Code

If you want to submit code you are encouraged to checkout the sources from CVS and keep them up-to-date. Patches can be submitted in the OpenACS Bug Tracker. If you need cvs commit rights you should contact the OpenACS Core Team. Once you have commit rights you should read our CVS guidelines and instructions. You should also check the projects page to see which projects are already underway that you can join.

Documentation

If you want to help with documentation, either by informing us of a mistake, or adding documentation for areas that don't currently exist, see the FAQ entry on helping out with documentation, or contact the community via the forums.

Organizing/Announcing an OpenACS Event

Don't be shy - just do it! You can announce it in the discussion forums or have an openacs.org admin post a news item for you.

I want to speak about OpenACS

You can mention OpenACS in any way you want. If you'd like to be more "officially" associated with the OpenACS project when you speak (at a conference, at a university group, etc...), please email any one of the gatekeepers and explain what you want to talk about, what your role in the OpenACS community has been to date (in case that isn't clear already), etc...