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How to Help

Excited? Want to help? Great!

Volunteer for the project

Much of the volunteering for this project can be done remotely. If you are interested, drop us an email! We need help in the following broad areas:

Developing scripts or implementing wishlist ideas
Writing documentation

Onsite Development

If you are live in the Kitchener-Waterloo region, you might consider volunteering your time onsite towards WCLP. In addition to the above areas, we need help with the following:

Supporting volunteers as they learn to use our installer
Supporting end-users
Beta-testing the distribution

For an up-to-date view of what we're working on, plus concrete tasks you could contribute, please check out our TODO list.

Provide feedback

Regardless of where you live, you could download the installer, set up a server, and try the distro out. We welcome all and any feedback.

Specifically, we could use feedback on the following issues:

If you try the installer out, we would love to know about your experiences – good and bad.
If you know of software alternatives we could use with our system, we would like to hear of them.
If you read our documentation, please evaluate its usefulness to you.

Find/develop software we need

Our project is possible because people released a lot of good free and open-source software that we could use. We still have a few holes we would like to fill. See our applications page for details.

Join an open-source project

Many teams are working hard to develop open-source software that we can use. Instead of creating some new project, you might help them out. Many projects welcome non-programmers – they need help with internationalization and documentation.

Abiword: Abiword is not state of the art software yet, but it is getting there. They need help in squashing bugs and writing documentation.
w3m: w3m is a fairly decent text-mode web browser. However, it lacks two major features: Javascript support and web standards compliance. People are working on Javascript support, but as of January 2003 nobody appeared to be working on CSS support. Maybe you could step in?
Dillo: Dillo is a lightweight, open source web browser. It is promising, but as of January 2003 it lacks many support for many important features. The Dillo folks are looking for financial support; they may be able to use developer help as well.
gmc/FoxCommander: Since the development of Nautilus, the GNOME project has discontinued support for Gnome Midnight Commander, and it is no longer under development. There are at least a dozen file managers in existence, but gmc is the closest clone of the Windows File Explorer we have found. People who were willing to continue development on gmc would help our project out.

Another interesting file manager is called FoxCommander. It resembles Windows Explorer fairly closely. Unfortunately, it has not been updated since 2001. (The FoXdesktop project itself is alive, though.)

A third alternative would be to alter an existing file manager so that it resembled Windows Explorer more closely. Adopting the XFCE file manager might be a possibility.

Give people money

If you have more money than time, you could offer some cash to some of the fine organizations that have made GNU/Linux in general and WCLP in particular possible:

Free Software Foundation: The Free Software Foundation concerns itself with Free software advocacy and development. It administrates the GNU project, which has been important in providing us with lots of good free software.
Software in the Public Interest: Software in the Public Interest (SPI) is a non-profit organization that administers funds for the Debian project. We use Debian as the underlying distribution for our project, and for the most part we are happy with that decision.
The Working Centre: Located in Kitchener, Ontario, the Working Centre is an employment centre that offers a variety of innovative services to the community. In addition to job counselling, job searches and resume critiques, the Working Centre offers “community tools” such as a community kitchen, a bicycle repair facility, a craft shop, a LETS system, and our project. We are very grateful to the Working Centre for providing hardware and Internet access so that we could develop this project.