How to contribute to Open Source Communities and Projects

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(How to contribute to) Open Source Communities
and Projects

• Hemant Goyal
• Undergraduate Student, Third Year Information
  Technology

not a definitive guide..
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Benefits

• Great experience
• Networking (social and professional)
• Companies love it (I hope they do)
• Your name shows up on google -)
• And many more..

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How?

• Finding the right community
• Do I have the technical expertise for such a
  project?
• Scale of project
• Extent of involvement of community
• Do I have the motivation to contribute?

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How?

• Finding the right project
• Look through the Project Ideas Page
• For the system designer, and analyst
• Bug Tracking Systems
• For the budding debugger and i-want-to-become-a-p
  ro-hacker class of people

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How?

• Contacting the right people
• Join the relevant mailing lists
• Get yourself an uber-cool irc handle
• Start hanging out in the irc channels

Kindly avoid extra cool names like
super_cool_dude, rocky_the_one, cool_dud(e) etc
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How?

• Dont be scared of asking stupid/silly questions
• Google for a solution
• When absolutely helpless, contact people!
• Learn to respect and value the time of the
  community members as well

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How?

• Please get comfortable with the Linux Environment
• The terminal/console is king
• Learn how to use GNU Automake, Autoconf, and
  other Build Tools
• Learn how to use gcc, other IDEs like Netbeans,
  Eclipse etc
• Learn how to install things RPM and Debian
  Package Installations

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My Experience A Case Study
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My Experience A Case Study
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My Experience A Case Study
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My Experience A Case Study
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My Experience A Case Study
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Looking for opportunities

• CSI_NSIT Yahoo Groups
• CSI NSIT forums
• NSITians Manusheel Gupta, Assim Deodia, Deepank
  Gupta, Aditya Vishwakarma, Arjun Sarwal..

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Thats all folks.

• Questions
• Criticism
• Random Rants
• . Are all welcome now