SME Server:Volunteering

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Why do we need volunteers?

For all kind of things! For one SME Server is a product made and maintained by people dedicating spare time and resources to create a secure and robust Small Enterprise server.

Donate

	Tip:
	SME Server and it's community Contribs.org are a collaborative effort of volunteers. You can contribute in many ways to SME Server like described in SME Server:Volunteering, but if you lack the skills or simply want to support SME Server in a financial way you can donate money. There are two ways to donate money to SME Server.

Donate through your contribs.org forums account

The preferred way is using the Donate option (located in the menu bar) in the forums. You are free to choose the amount and you can choose to donate monthly, yearly or only once.

The benefit of donating through your forums account is that your forum user name will receive a badge, showing your donation status. Donations will be made through PayPal

Donate directly through PayPal

The second way is to donate money by using PayPal directly. Just click on the button below to be taken to the SME Server PayPal donation page, but unlike a donation via the forums, you will not receive a forum badge.

Donations will be made through PayPal

Thank you very much for your help

Skills

Any skill are useful for the SME Server project.

If you are a developer of any kind, we will find something for you to do. Even if you think that you have no Linux skills you can still help. You can tell us if and how you understand the wiki pages, or more precisely, we would like to know what pages you don't understand. Thanks to the insights of new users we can continuously enhance readability of the wiki. Please add remarks to the discussion tabs of the page you are concerned with.

If, on top of that, you can write, you are invaluable. We need a lot of articles. There are thousands of Linux programs around, and more are released every day. In addition, new versions of existing applications are released. There is a need for a lot of hands to write about them and to keep reviews current.

Documentation

Documentation for SME Server was inherited from the prior distribution maintainers, e-smith and mitel. Their work gave SME a great base to work from.

The current developers have continued to improve the SME Server software and to reflect these improvements the Documentation has to develop too. These wiki-based manuals have been put in place to allow anyone to update or add new sections where they see fit.

The core manuals have been protected for stability, but anyone can request access to add and update howto and contrib pages to the wiki. If you've got instructions, solutions to common problems, neat tips and tricks, or just a good way to explain something, we'd love to hear from you. You may want to join our Document mailing lists to discuss your plans and coordinate with other Docteam members.

Wiki Team

This page is built with MediaWiki. The concept of a Wiki is that anybody may add and modify content. On Help:Contents, find a quick tutorial if you're unfamiliar with wikis.

As long as you edit anything on the wiki you are de facto member of the Wiki Team.

To make edits, you need to log in to the wiki. In order to do this, you will need to open an account. The information that SME Server requires for opening an account is very limited and easy to do and can be found here.

After you log in, you will see a toolbar at the top of the page that is always available. There is a link in the toolbar that is labeled with your username. This takes you to your "personal page". Use this page to introduce yourself and don't be shy. Write a word or two about your interests, especially those related to SME Server and Linux. If nothing else, tell us how you learned about SME Server.

Bug and New Feature Verification

You can help improve SME Server by finding and reporting bugs. This helps us to make our software as reliable as possible.

Our bug tracking system, Bugzilla, is used for all SME Server Linux products. If you have never written a bug report, please refer to Bugzilla Help to learn what kinds of information make the report most useful. Your role in that is to report possible bugs only via the bug tracker, and to encourage others to do the same. Refer again to SME_Server:Documentation:QA:Verification for helping with bug fixing and verification, the best way to learn is to fix other peoples' problems.

	Tip:
	For an easier way to see new bug or new activity you can look at Bugzilla_Reports Troubleshooter : There's a lot that non-coders can do to help in the bug tracker to improve bug report quality. We need help in making sure that bug reports are clear, that observations are fully collected, are separated from speculation and attempted workarounds, relevant log files are checked....

Programming

The most obvious way, for programmers, to participate in the development of SME Server is to post a patch as a suggested solution to an existing bug in Bugzilla. Each package has a maintainer, who will contact you to discuss your proposed solution. You may want to join our development mailing lists before you start coding in order to discuss your plans and coordinate with other developers.

For more information about getting source code and building your own packages, read the SME Server:Documentation:Developers Manual.

	Tip:
	If you would like to help or to learn about SME Server 9 you should look at SME_Server_9.0_Development or the Category:SME9-Development An overview of available roles is visible on SME_Server_Development_Framework

Mailing Lists

The communication among different teams go through a software called Mailman for which you choose the relevant list that interest you. All messages will be received in your email box, you will only respond to the email address of the mailling (ie devinfo@contribs.org for example) that your mail is sent to all registered users on the list . you can choose your Mailing Lists

Languages

A new system translation interface has been installed to facilitate translations of SME Server core packages as well as SME Server contribs, for more information have a look at the Translations page. The translation framework is located at http://translate.contribs.org. You may want to join our Translation mailing lists before you start your work and coordinate with other people.

Contribute

There is an active community in the forum that help all levels of SME Server users. Please have a look at the forum for an overview at http://forums.contribs.org

Suggestions

Visit the New Feature Request (NFR) page in the bug tracker and add your suggestion.

Only software with an OSI-compliant open-source license will be added to the SME Server project.

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