Community contributions to the project

We heard quite some voices from users requesting better possibilities to contribute to the project. Here they are.

In our dev meeting (or if you had a closer look: even before) we decided to ditch the old bug tracker in favor for a new one: Redmine, hosted by PolarFox, just on the same server as our website lives. This comes with some long-wanted features – and more liberty in configuration.

Two of the new features might be particularly interesting for you:

1. We now have a dedicated User’s Wiki for tutorials, guides and detailed descriptions of modules. The wiki lives now at https://darktable.org/redmine/projects/users/wiki but will probably change soon to a shorter URL, I’ll keep you up to date.

   Feel free to edit, add and move stuff just as you like. Some users (mostly asdkant) already started a users-driven “documentation” of darktable’s modules. The efforts have been ported as well and you’ll find them there.

2. Quite some users requested a forum for darktable. This is quite a delicate topic for us. Let me elaborate on this a bit more in detail:

darktable is a spare time project – completely. So no one of us is paid even for a little time he/she is spending to develop and improve darktable. But since it’s fun, we do it. On the other hand this means we invest quite some share of our spare time to write code. To stay in contact with the others we prefer the mailing list and IRC. We don’t have time to run and maintain a forum beside those communication channels – doing this would mean: no time for developing at all, and no fun for the developers (since coding is fun, you know …)

Having said this:

We understand the user’s need for a place to hang out and discuss usage and problems with darktable – and we understand that this place might look different, just as a forum. So we decided to provide forums to you but without any “support” from our side.

• Don’t expect us to hang out there all the time.
• Don’t expect us to read through the threads and help you with problems.

For these things we have the tracker, the mailing list and IRC.

So what we need is users that are willed to invest time, to moderate the forums, to create a structure that suits the needs. Anyone stands up? Contact me or write to the mailing lists. The forum can be found in Redmine: https://darktable.org/redmine/projects/users/boards. As you can see: we didn’t set up any structure of the boards – it’s up to you … :)

So that’s it.

We hope this will be a further step to build an active community around darktable. Of course we’re always open to discuss your ideas and needs with you.