@mehrmor:

I hope you know there are far more areas to contribute?

To name a few, writing dokus, translations, doing artwork, helping on the www side, bug hunting/testing...
I guess i did forget something, but not sure now.

^^ I know that certainly.But seeing as the OP's stress was on developers, I thought other kind of contributes weren't essential.

A few hours ago, I did try to translate some wiki pages into my language but the editor was so awkward that made me leave it off unfinished.I mean isn't the wiki pages designed to support bidirectional text?:(

Well, then i might have good news for you. There is ongoing work on improving the workflow of translating the wikis.

But aside from that, never underestimate every other section of contribution. Code itself is fine, but it also needs help from every other possible side, so whatever you can offer as help would probably be most welcome.

Well, that's certainly good news.I will check from time to time to see if the problem with rtl languages is solved and only then start translating wikis.

I've been a silent one, it's been over a year since i joined this forum. I've used KDE for that entire time-frame (and longer), and feel I could try give something back. I'm progressing on the programming front but as I've had to take some long breaks I'm of no use there yet.

I could however perhaps do some documentation. I'm moderately fast at learning things and feel there's a dire need for more documentation writers.

Please fill me in where I could help, and with regards to documentation some good tutorials and building blocks to do it right.

Thanks for you time.

Luke: You could start out with Userbase, a wiki for KDE users. It's very easy to get started with, and if you run into problems, you can get help in #kde-www on freenode (IRC).

Thanks hans, having a read now.

Edit:

Just added more to the K3b article and added an article on KSnapshot.

Tell me what you think

http://userbase.kde.org/KSnapshot

The first wiki article i have ever written, though i did read the wiki formatting guidelines beforehand

K3b - useful addition. I'm just slightly concerned that people might panic on the bit about changing permissions for applications - could you maybe think of a phrase or so that takes the panic out of that?

KSnapshot - nice addition. In the delay section you might like to point out that it is particularly useful if you want to activate a sub-menu, for instance.

A minor display point - I tend to use : with bullet points, each : being worth a couple of characters indent space, so you can use more than one if your entries look better that way.

An excellent start We look forward to seeing more of your contributions.

Thanks, i will be sure to keep those points in mind and make any amendments necessary

Sunday now, I'll have some time to write up more red-link articles as i feel they need the most attention first

Can I point you to http://userbase.kde.org/Different_Style_Pages, which lists pages that are either missing or needing attention? Thanks

Right cheers I'll do a few things later today. Shall i change KSnapShot listed there as done or work in progress?

You could just delete it from the Empty Pages list. It's fine, so it doesn't need to appear anywhere on the lists now. If you work on other pages you can adjust that page if you are confident that they are consistent with other pages. If in doubt, I'll look at it for you first.

WELL,

I am "ONE" student (BSc) of a tech university with a lot of very high
expectations.

In my humble view, everything what is done in Free Open Software is:
Some guy needs a software, e.g. for his/her thesis, and later some
software is being written, and distributed (and perhaps maintained) for
some time.

But that method of creating applications has no real SUSTAINABILITY:
What grade of proficiency do you need for KDE SC?

I would do it differently: I would propose a project, for which s.b has to
be available to support, place it on the WWW[GIT, BZR, HG] and additionally plan events of (first: hacking in general [C++, QT])(second: The project background)(third: project hacking stuff)(fourth: project maintaining)
"KLASSROOM" efforts are great but they are just one little piece in this puzzle. What about Moodle (Learning Platform)? What about "checking code online" by Saarbrücken University Tools (http://www.checkmycode.org) What about
all those folks who could excel in programming, designing, conceptioning
GREAT FLOSS Software? Why not turn the underpriviledged guys in "Sao Paulo" (if they're reliable and team playing) not into active contributors(devs, maintainers) etc... There will be an online micro-paying solution for artists and web contributors (which were given money by donors) from one of the founders of "Pirate Bay" torrent tracker which is called "FLATTR". This software is for now in closed beta, but will open up soon. What about all those kids coming from the OLPC and Sugarlabs projects. Perhaps they could help too... Possibilities seem endless, but somebody has to do the first step.

About code quality: Yes code could be definitively look ugly, but: everybody has to start from anywhere. Put their efforts into a sandbox... Earning money will in the near future more and more difficult for those who are benefitting from the overall econonomic prosperity (Rifkin: End of Work) and slightly having nothing to do. Mohammed Yunus did turn the "ugly" case of obtaining a simple credit from a bank into a new paradigm of lending money to the (women) poorest of the poor. It's actually working out.

To sum this all up:
Why not open UP FLOSS Development to EVERYONE? (Training is absolutely crucial)

Let me know, what to think of my extension of the first thougts (good, bad, neutral)?

FLOSS - For the ULTIMATE win!
sincerely Andreas_P

post.scriptum: If you find those ideas helpful (necessary) than take it to the next KDE/GNOME Conf... The more folks join the faster Ubuntu Bug No.1 is being fixed

Any KDE projects that don't use a semi-colen terminated language like C/C++ and Perl. Not trying to start a language flame war but I've never liked those languages and the older I get and the longer I've not had to suffer terminating lines with a semi-colen the less the idea of EVER using such a language appeals to me. I've been writing code for years, since the late 80s and worked in more languages than I can remember. Gave up the whole C/C++ thing around 96. Got out of development around 2002 and haven't written much but a few hello world type things in Gambas plus some small PHP scripts here and there but wouldn't take me long to get back on the horse if I didn't have to mess with semi-colens. I'm sorry my mind just instinctively rebels as the wasted keystrokes and the time wasted by forgetting one and pouring over several lines of code to spot the missing semi-colen. Maybe I can modify an IDE to automatically insert semi-colens or something. Get past the whole semi-colen thing and C/C++ isn't all that bad a language.

I have extensive experience as a DBA and am a writer. I have also done quite a bit of sysadmin work. So if I could be of help in one of those areas just let me know. Long as it doesn't involve semi-colens it's all good LOL.

I am willing to help but it seems like mission impossible. The bug reports are mostly user or packaging problems. Where do you go from there?