3.5 Contributing

Helping hands are always important for a free software project. New contributors are needed so it should be easy to jump in. Be it writing code, designing, translating, writing docs, blogging or donations. Lowering the barrier to participation is essential. Ideally there should be some »junior jobs« or quick opportunities for new people to get started in the code (Çetin et al., 2006). For that you need to mark bugs or tasks accordingly, see 7.4 Identify paper cuts. The different communication and documentation channels need to be apparent and easily available. For programmers, the repository is important, for translators the language files or online translation tool, for others the IRC channel or mailing list. The classic mailing list or IRC channel is not very approachable for people not already familiar with it. To still have that communication channel every seasoned developer is used to but also offer newcomers easy interfaces, there are two great free & open source web applications: OnlineGroups offers mailing lists with a web interface. For people not familiar with mailing lists this is easily usable by the web interface alone. freenode web IRC offers a web interface for IRC. People don’t even need a specific client, you can also just embed it on the website.