Ways To Contribute and Participate

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• Communicate - Use the Mailing Lists, this Wiki and the DSpace Chat Channel to communicate with the community
• Congregate - Attend user groups, conferences, library events, developer meetings - and any other venue where DSpace users meet to share information and ideas]
• Test - Download and try out beta releases; provide bug reports, experiences, feedback. Our DSpace Demo Server provides a place to test the latest and greatest version of DSpace.
• Develop - Contribute bug fixes, new features, developer cycles. Contributing code is far easier than you might think! See the ContributionGuidelines for more details.
• Translate - Translate the DSpace user interface into your language, using the new language pack feature of DSpace 1.3 and subsequent versions. See I18nSupport for more details.
• Prototype - The best way to gain support for an idea is to build and share prototype code. If you'd like to share existing prototypes, see the ContributionGuidelines for more details.
• Deploy - Share your experiences in deploying DSpaces in different organisations organizations and situations, at large and small scales
• Support - Become active members on the mailing lists , answer others' queries and help solve their technical problems
• Experiment - Take the system for a spin, try it out with different types of content and scenarios; tell everyone what you find. Again, the DSpace Demo Server provides a place to experiment with the latest and greatest version of DSpace. (If you are running a larger, scalability test experiment on the Demo Server, please let us know by emailing the 'dspace-devel' mailing list
• Donate content and metadata - To test and experiment with DSpace, free test collections unencumbered by restrictive usage rights are needed. Contact us via the mailing lists if you have content to donate for testing.
• Let us know if there's a way we can ease the process of contributing to DSpace
• Don't be shy! Contributions don't have to be 100% polished or perfect; no one will think any the less of you. "Share early, share often" is a well-known open source mantra. The sooner you contribute something, the sooner others can help with the polishing, and you no longer have to maintain the customisation against the evolving core DSpace platform, since it will be part of the platform!

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