I've had a lot of people in the past few days asking what they can do to help the project. This is awesome! One of the things we really want to do with Dreamwidth is make it a community-empowered site -- a place where everyone can contribute to the whole of the project if they find something that scratches their particular itch.
This email is going to be a quick overview of what outstanding tasks we have for people who aren't developers. All of these can be done with varying amounts of experience with computers and various computer skills. FEATURE DESIGN (behavior): We've seen a lot of suggestions to the mailing list, which is awesome! A lot of those suggestions do duplicate things that are already planned, and a lot of those already-planned things are in need of someone to adopt the project and work out precisely *how* it should behave. (It's easy to say "we should do this"; what we're most in need of is someone to go through and work out all of the different use cases for how that thing should behave in all sorts of different situations.) Don't stop reading if you don't know how to do what I'm talking about! This is easy enough that anyone can do it, and it's something that we're going to be relying on our community of users for, because we know that we won't be able to think of everything about how a feature should behave. The only skills it requires are the ability to write clearly and concisely, and a basic level of familiarity with LiveJournal and how it works. For information on how to write up specs, see our project- coordinating wiki: http://dreamwidth.cometheapocalypse.com/notes/ Design . You don't need to ask for something to be assigned to you; the wiki includes information on how to find available tasks in our request tracking software. Just grab something that needs to be done and do it. FEATURE DESIGN (visual): We also need people to mock up screenshots of *how* a particular new feature or change should behave, so that the engineers who are implementing it don't have to make decisions about what it should look like. Our team is working on writing up our visual interaction vocabulary -- the way that the site should behave, visually and workflow-wise -- and we'll soon have the site scheme set up and visible for people to look at, so they can make their choices from there. We'll also have examples of feature-design mockups to show you, so that there's more of an example. The skills this needs are familiarity with LiveJournal and how it works, experience with human interface guidelines (or a willingness to research and learn), and enough familiarity with some graphic program (GIMP, Photoshop, etc) to be able to produce mockups of how a feature should look. Again, the wiki includes information on how to find available tasks in our request tracking software. Grab something that needs to be done, and do it! GRAPHIC DESIGN (themes): We want to launch into open beta with some S2 styles that differentiate us from LiveJournal and the other LiveJournal-based sites out there, and more than that, additional themes for the styles that "everyone knows" from LJ and elsewhere. We have a bunch of new styles (made for 2005's LJ Style contest) that we're working to update to the most-current version of the code, which will eventually need themes; we'll have a theme-making party for the new styles as we get them updated to most-current code. In the meantime, though, most of the "older" LJ S2 styles have themes available for them that are, essentially, color swaps. We'd like to see if we can attack some of the older styles and challenge the impression that the themes available for those styles have to just be alternate colors of the existing layout. If you're good with CSS (or want to learn), and have an eye for visual design, this is the task for you. http://dreamwidth.cometheapocalypse.com/notes/S2_Styles is a list of all of the styles that are available to us. Pick one! Pick many! Examine the CSS classes, and see what you can do to tweak it. Generator, for instance, used to be the favorite style to use, back in the S1 days, because its structure and CSS classes were written well enough (for the time) that you could make it look like it wasn't Generator at all. Write a style sheet that moves things around, makes it look like anything you want, and give us that style sheet so we can turn it into a theme. You don't need to be a graphic artist to do this -- you can do it with just color and shapes. Or, if you *are* a graphic artist, you can make graphics to go with your layout (if you're willing to submit the graphics to us under an Open Source license for us to use and redistribute). You also don't have to write the theme layer yourself (although we certainly won't say no if you want to)! Bloggish/Six HTML and Style Contest are the two styles that are most easy to customize via CSS classing, but all of them have at least *some* level of customizability. I think it'd be cool if we launched with some themes that made people look at them and go "...that's Generator?" GRAPHIC DESIGN (styles): This is the task that requires the most experience, really -- you need to know, or be willing to learn, S2, LJ's layout/design language. But we're always on the lookout for new, innovative, easy- to-customize S2 styles. If you have, or would like to develop, a new S2 style and license it to Dreamwidth, Aveleh ([email protected]) has volunteered to be our styles coordinator, with help from Afuna ([email protected]), and exor674 ([email protected]) has offered her development environment. They're still working on getting our S2 core into shape, so there might be some falling rocks, but for the time being, if it works on LJ, it'll probably work for us too. If you've got a style that you want to contribute, talk to Aveleh or Afuna. SUGGESTIONS-MINING This is perhaps the one thing in this list that absolutely anyone can do. Suggestions (http://suggestions.livejournal.com) is a treasure trove of things that can be done to improve LiveJournal-the-service, and there are lots of really good ideas in there. There are a lot of really bad or impractical ideas in there, too. We have a page on the Wiki ( http://dreamwidth.cometheapocalypse.com/notes/ From_LJ_Suggestions ) for pulling together ideas that have been contributed to Suggestions over the years that we think would fit into the Dreamwidth codebase. All you need is the patience to read a lot of flame wars. ;) Pull up a particular month of the Suggestions community, edit the Wiki page to indicate (up top) that you're claiming that month, and read all of the suggestions for that month. Pay careful attention to the comments -- see how the community reacts to the proposal. (Although you don't have to be bound by the opinions of the commenters from LJ, because Dreamwidth does have some different goals and ideals, it's a good way to determine whether or not the suggestion is well-received.) If you think that the proposed suggestion would fit into Dreamwidth in some fashion -- even if not necessarily in the way that the initial proposal was written up -- add a link to it to the wiki page, categorized however seems appropriate. Be generous -- if you're not sure, add it anyway. This is the first-order sort, and after this, we'll narrow it down further, and migrate the useful things into our request tracking software. There are some other specific tasks that will be up for adoption over the next few weeks and months (and many of those tasks will run through our irc channel as we coordinate -- #dw on irc.livejournal.org), but these are the tasks that don't need specific project teams or specific assignments. Grab something that needs to be done and have at it! We appreciate any and all contributions. If you're contributing code, documentation, graphics, styles, or CSS stylesheets, we do ask that you fill out a Contributor Licensing Agreement specifically giving us the right to use your contribution. This is to protect us (by giving us an explicit license to modify and redistribute your work), and also to protect you (by explicitly stating that you provide your work without any warranty or expectation of fitness). For a copy of this agreement, which can be returned via postal mail or scan, see http://www.dwscoalition.org/ show_bug.cgi?id=85 . --D -- Denise Paolucci [email protected] Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations. Coming soon! _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
