ChallengeToTheCommunity

This is an open challenge to the community:

(Personally, I'd much rather see this couched as an invitation than a challenge... But I don't know who wrote it, nor how to comment on it other than by inserting content here... I'm not sure I get the ZenOfWiki yet. --[GlenDaniels])

If you use the product of an Apache project in your endeavour, take some time to contribute something back to the Apache community.

With the exception of the last item on the following list, taking a little bit of time to build the community is as free as the air you breathe (or as free as the JakartaTomcat build you just downloaded). Here are some less obvious ways you can contribute to the effort:

• Submit Documentation Fixes - Documentation is often overlooked, but serves as one of the most important products of any apache product. Good documentation is usually written by users for users. If you notice a typo, spelling error, wording error, or just documentation in err - make your contribution.

• Write UnitTests - All of the projects could use more unit tests. Learn JUnit or another xUnit testing framework and get to it.

• Answer questions on a user list - tomcat-user, struts-user, the traffic on these lists is huge. Albeit, many questions are inappropriately simple and could have been solved if the author had simply read a FAQ about the product. Answer valid questions, and create and develop meaningful FAQs where there are none.

• Contribute your knowledge to this wiki.

• Donate money to the ApacheSoftwareFoundation - Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, servers, conference call charges during Board meetings. http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

• Get involved - starting throwing patches at a developer list or Bugzilla.