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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. If you are a developer (or just interested in developer discussions), join the weekly DSpace Developers meetingsDeveloper Meetings. If you are a repository manager, you may wish to volunteer for the DSpace Community Advisory Team or attend their meetings / online discussions.
• 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. If you find a bug, report it via our Issue Tracker (your Wiki Account also works in the Issue Tracker)
• 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 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.
• Request new features / Share ideas/Report bugs - Is there something that you really need out of DSpace or isn't working right? Request new features/improvements or report bugs via our Issue Tracker (your Wiki Account also works in the Issue Tracker). You can also vote on existing features, or add your own comments/suggestions. Both of these can help developers decide which issues are the most important to the community.
• 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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• DSpace Community Sandbox - A Open Source shared community environment for working on DSpace Modules and Prototypes.
  • Add your projects, modules, protypes prototypes and code.

• The Jira Feature/Issue Tracking System (JIRA)
  • bug reports
  • feature requests
  • patches
  • You can also vote on existing features, or add your own comments

• The DSpace Channel - just an informal way to discuss ideas and ask questions. You can also help others who need some immediate help.

If You Want to Contribute

The overriding mantra is share early, share often. Here are a few things to consider:

• Please be sure to share your plans with the DSpace community on the 'dspace-devel' list before embarking on any sizable development effort. This will ensure you achieve your goals in a way that is consistent with the DSpace architecture and plans of the rest of the community. This will minimize the chances of a scenario where you have invested a large amount of time and effort into a body of code that does not fit in with the DSpace architecture or the consensus of the community, meaning that you need to spend further time refactoring your code or worse, 'forking' the code.

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See ContributionGuidelines for guidelines submissions must adhere to. That page also describes the general process for how a patch/contribution gets accepted into DSpace. The mechanics of creating a patch file are described in Guide to Developing with DSpace.

Copyright and Licensing of Code/Contributions

In the words of the PostgreSQL Global Development Group, which also uses the BSD license, "The simplest explanation of the licensing terms is that you can do whatever you want with the product and source code as long as you don't claim you wrote it or sue us." The BSD License under which DSpace is made available does not require you to make your changes public or open-source. It does allow for proprietary commercial use, and for DSpace-derived creations to be incorporated into proprietary commercial products. Works based on DSpace may even be released under a proprietary license (but still must maintain the license requirements).

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