In part one of this article, I shared five simple tips for contributing to the growth and well-being of any open-source project (besides the two obvious contributions: time and programming talent). I’ll now round out the list with five more.

8. Write a Tutorial The more documentation, the merrier. As soon as you get the software up and running, take some notes about how you did it. This is especially useful if you’re using a different platform or ran into an unusual situation. Write up your notes on the project wiki or forum, or just email them to the project manager and let him or her decide how to publish them.
9. Watch the Forums Open-source hub SourceForge.net hosts a set of forums for each of the projects it hosts, and you can spot common problems by tracking general discussion topics. Offering help as it’s needed can be less time-consuming than writing your own how-to and can save others loads of frustration.
10. Maintain the Roadmap Many open-source projects suffer from the lack of a written and published roadmap. The programmers are often too busy working on the code to communicate their intentions to users, and often don’t have both programming savvy and great communications skills. If you have the latter, you might consider volunteering with the project manager to gather, categorize, and prioritize all the suggestions that come in, and then summarize them in one convenient roadmap document. Whenever information like this is made available to the public, the project quickly gathers more attention.
11. Host a Mirror No open-source project can succeed if users don’t have access to the software. If you happen to host a server, you might volunteer some of your extra bandwidth to the project to help it make its downloads available to all.
12. Be a Non-Programmer Developer Even if you’re not a programmer, there’s always non-programming work to be done on the developemnt team. Open-source projects need people for testing, writing user manuals, creating new translations, and even graphic design; SourceForge keeps up its own help wanted page to keep track of the volunteer requests. A lot of new, up-and-coming projects need help with relatively easy jobs, and if you happen to speak Czech or wield a mean Photoshop filter, why not lend a hand?

Return to 12 Ways To Jack Up Your Favorite Open-Source Project (Part 1)

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