Max Cutler

Courant News was finally open sourced this past week­end while I was attend­ing BCNI Philly. That included the code, doc­u­men­ta­tion, and the open­ing of the project wiki and mail­ing list. While we’ve had a healthy num­ber of peo­ple look at the site accord­ing to our ana­lyt­ics and logs, we’ve not really had any con­tri­bu­tions from out­side the orig­i­nal team yet. Granted, it’s only been four days, but I thought I’d help stream­line the process of find­ing a way to contribute.

The first and eas­i­est way is to sign up on our Google Groups mail­ing list and join in the dis­cus­sions there. We’re going to try to cul­ti­vate both tech­ni­cal and con­cep­tual dis­cus­sions there, so please join in. If you have ideas or fea­ture requests or just need help set­ting it up, please post on the list.

Another easy thing to do is to read through the Project Ideas page on our wiki, which is where we are lay­out out a long list of fea­tures that we’d like to see added to Courant News in the near and long term. If you have more ideas, reg­is­ter a site account and post them. If you don’t want to go through that has­sle, you can just post to the mail­ing list.

If you’d like to take it to the next level, you can help write spec­i­fi­ca­tions and flesh out some of the ideas on that page. You can cre­ate a wiki page for that feature/idea, and write a more detailed guide to what the feature/idea will do and how it might work. It is rec­om­mended that design deci­sions be dis­cussed on the mail­ing list, but often it helps to just make a first pass at a spec before hav­ing peo­ple look at it.

Per­haps you have some cod­ing skills and want to help with the actual project code. We are cur­rently restrict­ing svn com­mit access to the orig­i­nal team mem­bers (myself, Rob, and Paul), but are more than will­ing to expand that group­ing once peo­ple show that they are trust­wor­thy and com­pe­tent. So to get your code into the project, we ask that you cre­ate a ticket about what you are adding/changing/fixing and attach a patch to it. One of us will review the patch, per­haps give some feed­back, and then it can make its way into the repository.

We’ve tried to make the inclu­sive across the full range of tech­ni­cal abil­ity and skillsets of those in col­lege news, so we hope that many of you will get involved in some capac­ity. Please don’t be shy!