Further Information for Student Contestants

This page contains text from the same page for the Drupal, Joomla and Silverstripe projects. Many thanks to them!

Task Categories

Most tasks have been sorted into the following categories. You can find all tasks in a particular category by searching for a particular label:

Code: tasks which involve patching existing code or writing new code
QualityAssurance: tasks which involve testing software or writing tests for an existing code base
Translation: tasks which involve translating documentation, etc. into other languages
UserInterface: tasks which involve UI design or user experience research
Documentation: tasks which involve spotting and fixing errors in existing documentation or writing new documentation
Outreach: tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing

Tasks which do not fall into one of these categories will be labeled "other".

Running GNOME

For most of the tasks you need a recent GNOME environment running. Fedora or Ubuntu do the job, but if you don't have one installed, or what you have is too old, checkout GNOME Developer Kit. It's an easy way to run GNOME on your current system. All you need is to download a largish file and a preferably 1 GB or more of RAM.

Getting Help

These pages will be the most useful for you as a newly arrived contributor:

GNOME Library: This is the general help site that includes tutorials, manuals, API documentation, etc.
gnome-love: This is the mailing list to help new contributors join the GNOME project. This list will also be used for the whole GHOP contest. You should definitely subscribe to this mailing list.

Getting More Help

If you have signed up to complete a particular task and you have some questions about how best to complete it, first see if the task description has specific instructions about whom to contact for assistance. If there are no specific instructions in the task, these resources should be helpful to you:

By Chat

Representatives from the GNOME project will be hanging out in #gnome-love on irc.gnome.org to answer any questions you may have. If they don't know the answer, they will be happy to point you in the right direction.

By Email

You can always ask questions on the gnome-love mailing list. Please let us know where you've looked for the answer so we can note for the future areas where our documentation can be strengthened (you can even help by improving the documentation yourself once you get the answer!). GNOME contributors are monitoring the list and will answer questions or get you in touch with the right person. Students are encouraged to answer questions as well and use the mailing list to communicate with one another.

If you have asked your question on the mailing list but find you need a more granular answer, please reply to the mailing list and not only to the person you provided you the answer.

Contacting the Administrators

If you need to contact a GNOME administrator for GHOP, please contact the soc-mentors-list mailing list. It is a private mailing list where you can reach all the administrators. Please prefer sending a mail to the gnome-love mailing list for issues that are not private.

Licensing and Attribution

The GHOP contest requires any code and other contributions you provide to be given under an open source license, to ensure your work is available for use by anyone in the world.

The GNOME modules are released under various free software licenses, generally the GPLv2 (and later) and the LGPLv2 (and later). Therefore you agree that the code, ideas and all other aspects of your contributions in your entry are released under the same license as the the module you're contributing to, so that they may be included in the GNOME project.

More info: Contest Official Rules

We are very pleased to have your help and as a courtesy are happy to attribute your work in various places, for example in blog posts. We will assume you want your name mentioned unless you suggest an alias, or the desire to remain anonymous.