Every volunteer project obtains its strength from the people involved in it. We invite you to participate as much or as little as you choose. The roles and responsibilities that people can assume in the project are based on merit. Everybody's input matters!

There are a variety of ways to participate. Regardless of how you choose to participate, we suggest you join some or all of our mailing lists.

Use the Products and Give Us Feedback
Using the products, reporting bugs, making feature requests, et cetera, is by far the most important role. Your feedback allows the technology to evolve.

• Join Mailing Lists
• Download Binary Builds
• Report bugs/Request additional features

Contribute Code or Documentation Patches
In this role, you participate in the actual development of the code. If this is the type of role you'd like to play, here are some steps (in addition to the ones above) to get you started:

• Read Guidelines
• Review Reference Library
• Download the Source Code
• Access CVS Repository
• Contribute Patches

Here is one developer's advice how to get involved. It specifically talks about Tomcat, but the general idea can applied to any of the Jakarta subprojects.

• Contributing -- Craig R. McClanahan

Here is another comment that was sent to the Turbine Mailing List about the opensource process and the contrast between how an opensource product and a proprietary product improve through the user community.

• Understanding Opensource -- Cameron Riley

Create a new subproject
Not every software product is suited for life at Jakarta, but we welcome candidates that follow the Apache Way. See Jakarta Subproject Proposals for more.