Hi Cæncel!
Quote:
i'm a regular user, how can i contribute with Synfig Studio or the project in general?
There is room to help in many areas where no specific knowledge is needed:
1) Using Synfig Studio regularly and reporting here or at the
Sourceforge Trackers or at the
mailing lists the bugs found, wanted features, new ideas, incorrect/unexpected behavior.
2) Promoting Synfig Studio! Be fan of
Synfig at Facebook, add Synfig to the credits any of your animations, tell friends to use it, to contribute to it.
3) Translate Synfig to your language. Now
it is very easy to translate Synfig to your language or any language you know well. This is a continous work because there are new translatable strings from time to time. It is also good to review the spelling of the current ones and suggest a new way to tell the same thing.
4) Update the wiki content. Wiki is always evolving. Every time any artwork is updated and any feature improved, wiki becomes obsolete. Review, correct, update and create the English pages of the wiki is always welcome. Spam cleaning is welcome too but there are some admin rules to do that. Translate the wiki to your own language is welcome too but for me it is more important to have the English version up to date.
5) Participate on the challenges! It is very atraccting for new incoming members to see what can be done with Synfig Studio. Don't be shy! Being a good artist and animator is not at the hand of many people so every one will appreciate the efforts.
6) Help at forums and
IRC. Take always a lot of patience with the newbies and put yourself on his skin for the time you were one! This is a good way to return the help received!.
7)
Donate to Synfig!. Currently the serves that are hosting the forums and website are not free and are supported by particulars. Also, participate to LGM costs money and donations might help to that once raised a decent amount.
8.) Organization of
Synfig Demo reels. This is a very entertained task that implies lots of activites. But the result will be very good for to grow Synfig's audience.
There are also many ways to help if you have knowledge of the following aspects:
1) Coding. C++, gtkmm knoledge is needed. If not an expert it can be replaced with heaps of voluntarism. It is also possible to write external applications that cooperate with Synfig Studio. Latest
svg2sif Inkscape pluging is one good example.
2) Infrastructure maintenance: Specific knowledge of phpBB, Mediawiki, Concret5, ssh, etc. is needed. You'll need to be upgraded to admin in some of the databases.
3) Building binaries. Currently there is not regular development snapshots binaries releases. It would be good to have a weekly/monthly snapshot release to allow people test upcoming versions. This can be done using your local computer or a server but in any case needs attention.
4) Creating binaries for Windows and Mac. We have two people working on that (Pixelgeek for windows) and secondplanet for Mac) but I swear that they will appreciate any continuous help. Also Windows binaries creation is not a mature task because it is made with some ah doc scripts that are not reproducible in any other machine than the Pixelgeek's one. Also Mac packages is always having lot of difficulties due to the lack of people with a Mac working on it.
5) Reading and cleaning the mailing lists. It is needed to be administrator of them to be able to do that. There is many spam there and it is tedious to distinguish the legal post form the spam. Currently It is me the only one who is in charge of that.
6) Cleaning forums and wiki from spam. Wiki is luckly with less spam since we added the anti-spam stuff but it can get worse. Forum is still having spam (less but still hiving) and it is always welcome any kind of spam killer help.
7)
Organize Google SoC for next year! We have never been able to participate to that and it is always needed a leader or volunteers to be responsible of the campaing, code mentor, etc.
8.) Participate at
LGM. If you are near the next LGM and want to prepare a talk about Synfig you're welcome. And I'm sure LGM people will welcome you as well!
9)
Revamp Ideas Torrent. It is basically dead because no one is maintaining it. Discuss if it is needed or not. Maybe we won't use it anymore.
I think that anyone can understand that it is not easy to directly join the community and start doing Infrastructure maintenance (for example). All the users that want to reach those delicated tasks (the second list) need to demostrate his fellowship and some history of contributions to the project before being promoted. We embrace any help but as it is said: "have a lot of power implies a lot of responsability".
-G
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