Help us to grow
You don't need necessarily to be a programmer in order to help out.
An apparently insignificant action can have a very positive impact on the project and in this page we'll explain why it's in your interest to help the project grow.
Table of Contents:
Are you using OpenWISP for your organization?
If you are using OpenWISP for your company or no profit organization, it's in your best interest to help the project to grow, because the more we grow as a community, the more contributors we'll attract which in turn will help us to improve the software, its documentation and keep alive the support channels.
Even small and apparently meaningless actions can make a big difference if performed by a sufficient number of people.
Note
If you need commercial support for your business, see the paragraph about Commercial support and funding development.
How to help
1. Open new discussion threads
The Github Discussions Forum and the Mailing List are excellent places to ask questions or share information regarding OpenWISP.
Every question and its replies are archived and indexed by search engines, creating a repository of solved problems that people can find over time.
For this reason, using these channels for support questions should be preferred over the chats.
Warning
Please be mindful that over 700 people read these channels and discussions are indexed forever. For these reasons, you should:
Keep the focus of the discussion technical.
Avoid irrelevant comments.
Be mindful about what you write.
Keep the tone calm and constructive.
Be respectful to the volunteers who reply in their free time.
Avoid generating noise.
When subscribing to the mailing list, we suggest choosing one of these options:
Receive all emails by creating a filter in your mailbox that moves the messages to a dedicated folder.
Receive a periodic summary (abridged or digest).
2. Send feedback
When you use OpenWISP, you may find ideas about improvements, new features or you may incur in bugs.
It's very helpful to us if you send us your feedback in some way. The preferred way to send feedback is to use the mailing list, but you can send feedback in any way you want.
If you have found a bug we will likely ask you to open a bug report in a specific github repository, if you can follow up with this activity it will be very helpful to us.
3. Stars on github
Unfortunately, when evaluating a project, a disproportionate amount of people look at the github stars as a method of evaluation on how popular a project is and if they don't see many stars they discard the idea of using it.
OpenWISP is composed of many modules and for that reason we don't have a single super popular github repository with thousands of stars, but when new users and developers look at our github organization page they may not get this at first glance and they will start looking for the numbers of stars.
Yes, we know it sounds silly, but since it does not cost you anything, it would be really useful if you could take a look at our projects on github and star the ones you find most interesting.
4. Documentation
If you find anything in this documentation that you think may be improved, please edit the document on github and send us a pull request, alternatively you can file a bug report or write to the support channels.
6. Blogging
Write a blog post about how you are using OpenWISP!
It would be great if you could explain the reasons for which you chose OpenWISP, the traits you like about it and the traits you don't like about it.
This is VERY helpful not only for the core developers but also for potential readers that may find your blog post and read about your use case: maybe they have the same use case and they want to know if OpenWISP is a good fit for them.
A concise, straight to the point blog post with some images and screenshots will go a long way in attracting new people into the community.
7. Conferences & Meetups
If you like to share your knowledge at conferences and meetups, you may cite OpenWISP in one of your presentations or lightning talks, you may also show some of its features, if relevant.
8. Participate
By participating actively in the support channels you can also help us a lot: the welcoming level of an open source community is a key factor in attracting a good numbers of contributors.
9. Contribute technically
Are you skilled in one of the following areas?
technical writing
python
networking
graphic/web design
frontend development
OpenWrt
Freeradius
linux
devops
If yes, you can help us greatly. Find out more about this subject in How to contribute to OpenWISP.
10. Commercial support and funding development
If your company uses OpenWISP for its business and needs professional support on custom setups, development of new features or commercial support, you can hire a specialist which very active in the community so they can help you achieve what you need.
Hiring a specialist is usually more effective than trying to figure it out alone: specialists know OpenWISP very well, they can suggest what are the best ways to accomplish something with the least effort, with the highest quality and in the least time at the least cost. Moreover, they will produce solutions that can also be shared with the rest of the community and become part of the OpenWISP ecosystem.
If you want us to help you in getting in touch with OpenWISP specialists, please write to: support@openwisp.io.
5. Social media
If you are using OpenWISP, it's very useful to let the world know about it by sharing a public post on social media using the #openwisp hashtag.
We also have a twitter account and a facebook page you can follow to help us share news about our community.
If more people talk about OpenWISP on social media, we increase the chance that those who have the will and technical skills to contribute will hear about its existence.