Difference between revisions of "Contribute"

Revision as of 21:51, 6 May 2016

Testers, documentation helpers and programmers

• We would love help with testing.
• Help us with completing or translating the Manual which is developed online in its own wiki.
• We also need translators for the Audacity software.
• If you're a programmer, check out the developer guide, subscribe to the audacity-devel mailing list. When you've got Audacity compiling, tell us if there's any bugs on the Bug List that you'd like to tackle or any new or improved features you have a passion about implementing.

Other Ways To Help

• Help us improve the articles on this wiki and suggest ideas for onward development.
• Help out on the Forum by answering our users' questions. We especially need people to answer questions in other than English.
• Tell us how we can improve Audacity by sending:
  • feature suggestions
  • bug reports
  • comments about anything to do with Audacity

to our feedback address.

In more detail...

Developers

We always need more developers! Here is a proposed "Audacity Needs You!" page for the main Audacity website. The intention was to put it in a high traffic area - but it seemed a bit too gung-ho. There's also a landing page, "Audacity Sounds Great" for free developer recruitment FLOSS adverts provided by stackoverflow. Better developer documentation would also help us. Our guides for compiling Audacity could do with streamlining. The relative difficulty of compiling Audacity on Mac and Windows is one barrier to more users getting involved in the development process. Join our developers' mailing list and introduce yourself!

Quality

Testers. Test coordinators. Test script writers. Quality system designers and managers. We need you all.

Documentation Writers (The 2.0.x Manual)

We also want to hear from any highly experienced users who can help with keeping our officially released documentation such as the online alpha development Manual up-to-date and relevant. We need help translating this Manual so that we have localised documentation to complement Audacity's translated interface.

Wiki Helpers

Ask for a Wiki account to help us improve pages by making the writing clearer, correcting spelling and grammar and organising the information to complement the Manual. These kind helpers are also affectionately known as Wiki Gnomes.

Documentation Writers (This Wiki)

We often link to pages in this Wiki when answering questions from users. Help us keep these pages including the Tips and Tutorials up-to-date. As the program changes, these pages need updating. Screenshots on the Wiki need updating too. The current version of Audacity makes capturing the screenshots easier.

Translators

The Audacity software and website is translated into many languages. We need translators for other languages.

Our officially released documentation has never been translated. We welcome offers of help to work on translating our alpha Manual.

Suggestions on improving/streamlining the way we translate are welcome too.

Forum and -users mailing list

The main way we help users who need personal support with Audacity is on our Forum. If you are an experienced user, you can perform a great service for Audacity by helping to answer Forum questions. Monitoring the questions and issues that arise provides valuable input for our released Frequently Asked Questions and influences the wider task of making development decisions.

An alternative way Audacity users help each other and learn about our program is the audacity-users mailing list. This is a subscription-only mailing list where messages to the list are sent out directly by email. Feel free to join audacity-users and give a hand to new users!

Website text

The main website needs to be kept up-to-date with releases and features. Of course we also want to keep the site easy to use and free of "typos". We have a list of pending website changes and we welcome comments about our website.

Graphics

In the longer term future we may need an update to graphics for Audacity itself, and for our main website and wikis. Someone with graphics skills could help us achieve visual consistency across the program and our sites. We would need a graphic designer with an eye for the whole picture who can help with improving Audacity's graphics in a systematic way.

Campaigns

We need help with campaigns:

• Audacity took part in GSoC (Google Summer of Code) in 2008 and 2009. We always need help planning for future participation, from getting ready to run a GSoC, to alerting potential students to the opportunity, to co-ordinating development during GSoC itself.
• We're considering being part of the next Google Code-in Contest (an open source development and outreach contest targeted at 13-18 year old students around the world).
• Audacity language learning initiative. This is a plan to develop an ecosystem of language learning tools around Audacity. Part of the plan involves building better links with the rockbox project so that Audacity can author audio in structured formats that assists language learners. This was talked about briefly at the 2008 GSoC mentor summit, but has not progressed beyond that.

Ideas? Want to Contact Us?

Didn't find what you were looking for? Here are various ways to contact us.