Joining the RapidSMS community

We’re always excited to welcome new volunteers to the RapidSMS project. As it keeps growing, we need more people to help others and contribute back to the community. As soon as you learn RapidSMS, you can contribute in many ways:

• Join the rapidsms mailing list and answer questions. This users list, the primary RapidSMS mailing list, is used to ask and answer questions, help work through bugs, and discuss general RapidSMS topics.
• Join the rapidsms-dev mailing list. This list is used to discuss RapidSMS core and active country projects. This ranges from new RapidSMS features to large scale RapidSMS deployments in Zambia. If you’re interested in any of this, please join the conversation!
• Join the #rapidsms IRC channel on Freenode and answer questions. By explaining RapidSMS to other users, you’re going to learn a lot about the framework yourself. You can use the webchat client for this too.

And, of course, you can help out by working on RapidSMS.

• Report bugs in our ticket tracker.
• Follow our Coding standards and best practices.
• Open pull requests for features and bug fixes against the develop branch. We use the Gitflow model for our development. See Submitting changes back to the project for more on this.
• Comment on open issues and pull requests. Try the changes yourself and report on how well they work in the issue or pull request. See Reviewing pull requests for more on this.
• Try the develop branch and report any problems, especially if recent changes break your own application.
• Improve the RapidSMS documentation (what you’re reading now!).
• Participate on the rapidsms-dev mailing list.