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Glow - Getting Started

The Getting Started page for users describes how to download, install and run Glow. It also has some pointers if you want to report a bug or to request a feature in Glow.

If you have already read our Getting Started page for users and want to participate in the Glow project in other ways, this page is for you! We offer some advice and guidance below on some important ways you can contribute to Glow, but the ways that you can contribute are limited only by your creativity!

After reading the First Steps section below, you might want to go to the main Glow site for developers and other contributors to Glow if you already know how you want to contribute!

First steps

One of the first things you should do is to join the Groupware project as an Observer; this will add Groupware to your personal OpenOffice.org start page.

If you are interested in contributing as one or more of the roles below, or if you have another way to contribute, please send a mail to the dev mailing list at groupware.openoffice.org and talk about the kind of contribution you would like to make. One of the Glow team should respond pretty quickly to chat with you one-to-one about this and help you get started; if you decide to go on to be a contributor, this person will likely be your project "buddy" until you have made a few successful contributions.

Below is an overview of some different kinds of contributor to Glow.

Contributor Roles

Developer

One of the most concrete ways you can contribute to Glow is accept responsibilty for open tasks ranging from a single class to a small component to an entire Glow module. If you are taking responsibility on a bug, please update the status of the Issuezilla bug or send a mail to the dev mailing list.

Many developers who have only a little time are able to take bugs submitted in the Glow category of OOo Issuezilla, and then help to diagnose or code a bug fix.

Everyone who contributes code to Glow has to sign the JCA; this is a painless process! After that, we ask developers to go through a confidence building stage with the project; this basically means that you will be allocated a buddy who will offer you guidance on coding practices and review code that you can submit via mail. We require this even for developers who are successfully contributing to other large open-source such as Mozilla or even other OpenOffice.org projects. Once you have successfully submitted a number of bug fixes or small modules that meet essential quality criteria, you can be given full Developer access, which means you can commit code directly to Glow CVS.

Tester/QA

We hope that every user of Glow will let us know either via Issuezilla or a mail to  when something is broken, but we also need contributors who will help us by performing regular in-depth feature tests of Glow. To help us to ensure we get to a consistent high level of quality assurance, we also need testers who will document a manual test procedure (using the Glow user interface) or even develop automated tests for API's or libraries.

Another important contribution is to verify the unconfirmed Glow bugs that have been reported by users.

Evaluation/Pilot

Glow 0.1 is a pre-alpha release, but we are interested in receiving feedback from companies that are considering upgrading or replacing their groupware system within the next 12 months. We want to understand what are the requirements that are driving your change.  If Glow may meet your needs on the client side, please contact the user mailing list at groupware.openoffice.org or contact Colm.Smyth at sun.com - we will try to support your evaluation or at least understand what we would need to provide to meet your company's requirements.

Requirements/Domain expert

If you are an active user of internet groupware, or you work at a company that has deployed a group calendaring, mail, instant messaging or content management system, or you regularly use web-based groupware like Yahoo mail or Hotmail, you may have some unique insights into the needs of groupware users. We welcome feature requests from groupware users, but we especially need input from people who can make a real analysis of the requirements for a specific form of groupware.

Of course, we are also happy to read the analysis of experts and authors in the field of groupware, especially if you can point out the parts that you thought were most important, interesting or useful to Glow. If you know of an especially valuable online document, please send a mail to the user mailing list at groupware.openoffice.org.