On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 19:49 -0600, Benjamin Campbell wrote:

Howdy For the past week I have been browsing the Fedora community in hopes of finding out more about the project. I am greatly interested in contributing to the project, but since this being my first open source project I am a little green on how to get things going. I would highly appreciate any guidance or suggestions anyone can provide.

Hi Benjamin, thanks for your interest in Fedora! Fedora is definitely a great place for getting involved in open source. You will find that there are a lot of ways to help here. The Fedora mission is to advance open source, and we really believe in the power of upstream communities, and working with them to make lasting, maintainable solutions that work for everyone in the FOSS world.

Open source tends to be very participatory in nature -- you can simply find something that interests you and hop right in. It might feel weird walking into a room and talking loudly in real life, but in the open source world, that's pretty much how things work. :-) It looks like you've already been able to find mailing list resources -- another good way to communicate with project members is using IRC.

Read this first to get your system set up: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/IRCHowTo

Then read this to find some IRC channels that interest you: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate#IRC

Introduce yourself and ask questions. (You don't need to ask if you can ask -- just ask!) :-) The general etiquette in chat rooms is just to be polite and if you need more direction, speak up. I hang out on the #fedora-docs channel, among many others, and will be overjoyed to hear from you if/when you stop by.

The first group I am attracted to is the Ambassadors group. With two years of practical technical support in my repertoire, I have gained the uncanny ability to convey technological based information to less than technologically based people. Additionally I have been familiarized with issue troubleshooting, tracking, and resolvent for both end users and intra-department complications. I have also worked on technological documentation aimed at both development issues and the 'lowest-common-denominator' issues.

The Ambassadors group is a great place to be if you want to evangelize for Fedora and free and open source software. We also have a Marketing group which deals more directly with media contact and producing a consistent, positive, and strong name and message to go with the Fedora name.

The second group I found interesting was the OS Development group. Although I am not strong in programming methods, and I am fluent in several languages including C/C++, Perl, Ruby, and PHP. I feel that my limited knowledge may not provide much in bleeding advances to the project, but I would be thrilled with minor details and support for more advanced projects.

AHA! You would probably be a perfect candidate for the BugZappers program, which does triage and QA on Fedora. Jon Stanley, who's another volunteer just like yourself, has really brought this program back and turned it into a real juggernaut. They hang out on the #fedora-qa channel and the fedora-test-list mailing list. He's a great guy, both smart and helpful, and very willing to help new contributors get started.

But most importantly, I am interested in the entire project no matter the aspect. I feel that open-source provides both the world and the contributor with wealth of great things. The technological community can only benefit from projects where advancement is more important than profit. Additionally the experience with the open source environment is something I am greatly interested in. Contribution to a large scale project can only help in advancing my skill set in the technological field. Again, I thank you for any support or guidance and look forward to hearing from you.

Good to meet you, Benjamin, and we look forward to your contributions!