Welcome to the KDE Community. By joining our team, you will be part of an international effort by thousands of people working to deliver a stunning Free Software computing experience. You will meet new friends, learn new skills and make a difference to millions of users while working with people from all around the globe.
There are many different ways you can become part of KDE. You might want to translate software into your own language, create beautiful artwork, write code or report bugs, to name just a few things you could do. You might even have an existing project you want to bring into the KDE family. This page will give you a brief introduction to things everyone in KDE should know, and help you get started with contributing.
Code of Conduct
We want to make sure the KDE Community is, and remains, a welcoming and friendly place that people feel comfortable in. One way we try to achieve this is with the KDE Community Code of Conduct, which we ask you to abide by when interacting with the rest of the KDE Community.
Getting in touch
Part of being in a community is talking to the other members. In KDE, the main channels of communication are IRC (a realtime text communication system), the forums and mailing lists.
To communicate over IRC, you will need a way to connect to the freenode IRC network. We suggest Konversation (see the handbook for help in setting it up), although a convenient alternative if you want to get going quickly is freenode's online webchat. You will need to choose a nick (the name you appear on the network as), connect to freenode and join a channel. #kde is a good first channel to join. This is the central channel for users and contributors to communicate, but most teams will have their own channel.
A good mailing list to subscribe to as a new member of the KDE Community is kde-community (you will need to subscribe before you can send emails to the list).
The links in the #Ways to contribute section will take you to pages with more specific information, including how to get in touch with specific teams.
Mentoring
KDE has a variety of programmes to introduce new contributors to KDE. These include external programmes that we participate in like the Google Summer of Code and the Outreach Program for Women, as well as KDE's own programmes, such as Season of KDE. You can find an overview on the Mentoring page.
Existing projects
If you have a project already that you want to bring into KDE, we have an incubation programme to help make that happen. You can find all about it at the Incubator page.
By becoming a developer in the KDE community, you can make a big difference while enjoying a challenging and fun experience. You'll learn to be a better coder, you will get to implement new features and defeat daunting bugs, creating a stunning product, all the while collaborating with people from all around the world.
Are you fluent in multiple languages? By contributing your translations of text to the KDE software, you will help KDE be a better part of the global market and more accessible to the millions of potential users out there.
Are you able to create images that move people? The KDE community is always in need of good art and even more so: good artists. Working with such an international team of volunteers over the web will certainly be a challenge, but a rewarding one. Icons, splash screens and themes create an identity for an application. By creating art for the KDE community, your portfolio will be seen by a large audience and will help KDE products have a strong branding - making a real, tangible difference.
There's lots of people using and testing KDE software. By providing useful and up-to-date documentation, you will make a big impact on helping people understand how to make the most of KDE SC.
Do you know how to get the word out on the street? Marketing and promotion of KDE is done through a mostly grassroots effort. By being a part of the team, you will be spreading the word of KDE to people that may not otherwise be able to benefit from it. You'll be part of a flexible and interesting team of people who are moving the world!
In the past, there was a specific team at KDE which was focused on finding loose ends in KDE applications and tying them together. This was a task of user case studies, writing articles, documentation, creating missing artwork for consistancy, and other miscellanea. Currently, the Quality Team has set its focus on beta testing.
By joining the KDE BugSquad you will help developers notice valid bugs quicker and optimize their workflows, fixing the issues in less time, and giving practical support to the KDE community. Our team keeps track of incoming bugs in KDE software, and goes through old bugs. We verify that a bug exists, and is reproducible, and that the reporter has given enough information. Coding skills are not required to participate, however experience has shown us that our team members often learn so much and have so much fun we often lose them at some point to the ranks of the developer teams...
