How to Help

As with any open source project, there are several ways you can help:

• Join the mailing list and answer other user's questions
• Report bugs, feature requests and other issues in the issue tracking application.
• Build Maven from sources and submit patches to reported issues (both those you find, or that others have filed)

Your participation in the community is much appreciated!

Why Would I Want to Help?

There are several reasons these are good things.

• By answering other people's questions, you can learn more for yourself
• By submitting your own fixes, they get incorporated faster
• By reporting issues, you ensure that bugs don't get missed, or forgotten
• You are giving back to a community that has given you software for free

How do I Join the Project?

Projects at Apache operate under a meritocracy, meaning those that the developers notice participating to a high extent will be invited to join the project as a committer.

This is as much based on personality and ability to work with other developers and the community as it is with proven technical ability. Being unhelpful to other users, or obviously looking to become a committer for bragging rights and nothing else is frowned upon, as is asking to be made a committer without having contributed sufficiently to be invited.