-How does one "get involved with a SIPB project"? I’ve had countless prospective SIPB members ask me this question, but I have never really had a good answer for them. It’s a complicated, ill-defined process that even recent new members have difficulty describing. Even worse, no two people ever have the same experience, and what worked for one person may not work for another.
+How does one "get involved with a SIPB project"? I’ve had countless new SIPB members ask me this question, but I have never really had a good answer for them. It’s a complicated, ill-defined process that even recent new members have difficulty describing. Even worse, no two people ever have the same experience, and what worked for one person may not work for another.
This essay is an attempt to describe this process. Not as a series of step-by-step instructions, because such a recipe doesn’t exist, but as a philosophy, an identification of a mindset that will get you asking the right questions, talking to the right people, and working on the right problems. We’ll take the huge task “Get involved with a SIPB project”, and continually divide it into smaller, more well-defined problems, until we are left with tasks that you can tackle head-on.
Let’s get started.
+You may also be interested in this document: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/process
+
+Level 0: Motivation
+-------------------
+
+How do you pick a SIPB project to contribute to? One way to look at this problem is finding a project whose goals and community align with yours, so that contributing to the project is engaging and fun.
+
+* Does the project solve a problem that you also want to solve?
+
+* Does the project offer opportunities to learn technical skills that you would like to acquire?
+
+* Does the project have a good way for you to start contributing, e.g. it is written in a programming language you already know or want to learn, or it is running a system you have some familiarity with?
+
Level 0: Milestones
-------------------
* Have you discovered a security vulnerability in the project?
+* Do the project maintainers trust you?
+
* (probably more)
All of these exercise different dimensions of involvement with the project, and you don’t have to do all of them to get root! But there are a lot of ways to contribute without having bits, so don’t get discouraged if you haven’t gotten them yet.
Level 1: Getting in touch
-------------------------
+The single most important first step is setting up lines of communication with the current set of project maintainers. This can be tricky, because in general every project has a different preferred medium of communication, and a different set of social conventions around this medium.
+
+...
+
Level 1: Fixing bugs
--------------------
sipb-www / wiki.git / blobdiff