The open source community
A unique part of an open source software like OpenProject is the open source community. It is a global community of users, developers, advocates and anyone else interested and engaged in the software’s usage, development and growth. Collaboration within the community can happen in different ways. Let us show you how.
Exchange amongst the open source community members
The leader of the open source software wants to facilitate the creation of a community. Thereby, an open source community forum can be used as a means for exchange of thoughts, ideas and help. Everyone is invited to post or start a conversation to connect with each other. Members can ask each other for support in technical matters, e.g. if they have a question regarding the use of a certain feature. Or they can exchange best practices, discuss possible developments and many other topics. As all feeds are saved and open to everyone, your question might already be answered and you can find your answer directly in the forum.
OpenProject has a global, active community that is in constant exchange with the internal OpenProject team as well. Its forum is divided in different categories to make sure the right people can connect with each other according to the topic they want to discuss, e.g. development or installation support. Especially for the users of the free OpenProject Community edition, the forum can serve as a support tool as professional support is not included in the Community edition.
Collaboration on the open source project
Beyond the exchange in e.g. a forum, an open source community is collaborating to develop the open source software further and drive its growth. Developers and users can participate in the development in various ways:
Contributions to the code or documentation
One important aspect of the open source community contribution is software development. Software developers and engineers are invited to contribute to the code of an open source software to improve the product or add to it. Thereby, the development is centered around the user, it should increase the user’s benefit. OpenProject is continuously developed and maintained by the OpenProject team together with an active international community to provide a powerful feature set and intuitive user interface. Thereby, we follow a requirements and product development process. If you want to contribute, please follow our development handbook. Sometimes it happens that one of our customers sponsors the development of a feature that they need. This is also a way of collaborating and contributing to the evolvement of the open source software.
Alternatively, if someone is not a developer, they could contribute to the documentation of an open source project. This could happen by adding use cases, complementing feature descriptions, fixing spelling errors or broken links etc. OpenProject invites you to collaborate on its documentation. Find out how to contribute here.
Feature requests
At the heart of an open source software is the user. The software should fulfil the user’s needs and solve their problem. That is why it is essential to integrate the community in the development. Consequently, they can contribute by submitting feature requests or expressing their needs that they would like to be addressed by the developers.
OpenProject invites its community to submit feature requests and ideas for improvement. We keep track of how many users want a certain feature and consequently prioritize these requests and see how we can fit them into our roadmap. This is a transparent process that can be tracked in our public OpenProject project.
Bug reporting and fixing
A software is never complete and never error-free. That is why the community is so important in identifying, reporting and fixing bugs. Fixing bugs is of course mostly reserved for developers. However, identifying and reporting bugs can be done by anyone. In general a diverse global community can report more bugs than an internal team working on a proprietary solution. Thus, open source solutions can be of superior quality.
If you find any bugs in OpenProject, please report them, we really appreciate it. Then our internal OpenProject team can prioritize and work on them to improve the quality of our application.
Testing
Software needs constant testing, making sure existing as well as new features are working as intended. This is where the community can also come in and help testing to make sure the solution is robust. As everyone has access to the open source software code, it can be more thoroughly reviewed by the community and errors spotted earlier and issues solved faster and more diligently.
OpenProject uses automated tests throughout the stack. If you want to start working with the OpenProject test suite, you would need to use the testing setup with Github Actions. Find more details here.
Translating
The international community can also contribute by translating the application or documentation in their native language which will be very useful to expand the software’s usage across different language regions and for those users who are more comfortable in their mother tongue than e.g. English. OpenProject is available in more than 30 languages. We use CrowdIn as a platform for the translation. Get an overview of the process and join us in translating OpenProject to your language.
