Jena Website » Getting Involved

[Paolo Castagna <ca...@googlemail.com>]

The "Getting Involved" section on the Jena website is aimed at users
or developers who want to help or be involved in the Jena community.

Jena users can help improving the documentation, helping other users
answering questions on the jena-users mailing list, promoting Jena
with other users via Twitter or blogging about Jena, joining discussions
on Jena mailing lists, reporting bugs or feature requests, running tests
on different systems/databases, telling us when they use Jena and why,
etc.

   We can help Jena users helping us by telling them:
    - how to joins the jena-users and jena-dev mailing lists
    - how to reach use via IRC #jena channel
    - point them to blog(s) of people involved with Jena
    - clearly point them at the JIRA issue tracking system
    - pointing them at documentation we would like to have feedback about
    - showing them how they can run tests on their machines/databases
    - pointing them at: http://www.apache.org/foundation/getinvolved.html
    - ...

Jena users, since Jena is a Java library, are often Java developers.
However they could use only command line tools and software such as
Fuseki.

Jena developers can help us with: improving the documentation, finding bugs,
providing patches for bugs or for new features. They can give us new ideas
and feedback on features they miss or features they find hard to use. They
can integrate Jena with other storage systems or project. They can discuss
on jena-dev and provide their contribution or help that way. They can use
SNAPSHOTs and provide feedback to us, etc.

   We can help Jena developers by:
    - clearly pointing them at the JIRA issue tracking system
    - giveing them clear instructions on how to check out and build Jena
      modules
    - giving them a roadmap of things we are working on, why and
      stating what they could do to help us
    - giving them a place where we could list interesting ideas or
      project proposals
    - promoting featured projects which use Jena in interesting ways
    - clearly describing bugs and new features on JIRA and what it
      would take to fix a problem or implement a new feature
    - teaching them how to extend Jena and/or other projects/modules
      (such as ARQ, TDB, etc.)
    - showing them how easy it is to generate a patch or apply an
      existing one they might need
    - giving them clear guidelines and best practices on how to best
      use Jena (and things to avoid)
    - pointing them at: http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html
    - ...

Suggestions and ideas on how Jena users and Jena developers can help us
and how we can help them (in addition to good quality documentation)
are more than welcome.

Next step is to produce a draft (not long): 4-5 paragraphs for Jena users
and 4-5 paragraphs for Jena developers to be included in the "Getting
Involved" section. I'll send a proposed draft.

Existing content is here:

  - http://incubator.apache.org/jena/contributing.html
  - http://www.openjena.org/contrib/contributions.html
  - http://www.openjena.org/contrib/contrib-guidelines.html
  - Some parts of ARQ documentation is aimed at developers who want to
    extend ARQ and/or SPARQL via custom filter functions or property
    functions (the "Getting Involved" section for Jena developers
    should link to those parts of the documentation).
  - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JENA
  - ...

If I missed existing content which you think should go below the
"Getting Involved" section, please, point me at it.

Thank you,
Paolo