Get Involved

So building a world-class desktop sounds cool to you? You want to get involved in the Desktop Team?

Brilliant!

Keeping in Touch

• Join our mailing list (medium traffic)

• Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode.

Work on Bugs

Bug management is an important task for the desktop team at the moment. It is required to prioritise bugs and what issues should be tackled first. Here are some ways you can help.

• Join the Desktop bug team

• See the main Desktop bug page for more information about how we stay on top of bugs and how to find more opportunities to help.

Communication with other teams

We want to have a good relationship with the people we work with.

• Work on forwarding patches upstream. Having a low delta is better for everybody.

• Become point of contact between the distribution and upstream for packages you have an interest in
• Work with other teams and Debian

Documentation

Good documentation helps new contributors to know where to start and also not-so-new team members how to do specific things; you can help with

• Writing specifications (i.e documents on Launchpad and the wiki that describes the changes we want to get implemented and how)

• Update wiki pages for the DesktopTeam (goals, list of things to do, documentation, how to start, etc)

Packaging

This is also an important task for the Team. You can

• Help doing desktop packages updates (update the package, test the new version, communicate issues with upstream if there is any)

• Pick a package you have interest in (contacting the usual maintainer before starting to work on it might be a good idea) and start working on it. No need to have uploads right to start on a package, having your first updates mentored is usually a good start to learn. If you do a good job you can quickly become the maintainer for that package
• Work on fixing issues by writing patches or backporting them from upstream and applying those fixes to the packages
• Package new software

To learn how to package well, you should read the following:

• Getting started becoming an Ubuntu Developer.

• How the Desktop Team uses git.

Testing

• Help testing GNOME, write specific test plans

Other

• New ideas: bring your good ideas of changes for the Ubuntu desktop and help to implement them
• Teams: if you can motivate several people to work on a project creating a team around it is a good way to organize work: pda, printing, mono, telepathy, etc

• If you have crazy ideas, write them up on DesktopTeam/Visions and discuss them on the mailing list.

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CategoryDesktopTeam