Title: Get Involved
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You don't need to be a software developer to contribute to 
Apache Accumulo™. To be successful this project 
requires a huge range of different skills, levels of involvement and degrees of 
technical expertise. So, if you want to get involved in Apache Accumulo, there 
is almost certainly a role for you. 

We are looking for people to:

  - provide feedback
  - write or update documentation
  - help new users
  - recommend the project to others
  - test the code and report bugs
  - fix bugs
  - give us feedback on required features
  - write and update the software
  - create artwork
  - translate to different languages
  - anything you can see that needs doing

All of these contributions help to keep a project active and strengthen 
the community. The project team and the broader community will 
therefore welcome and encourage participation, and attempt to make it 
as easy as possible for people to get involved. 

## Mailing lists and Meetups

Your first engagement with the project should be to subscribe to our
[mailing lists][1].  You can also [look for Accumulo Meetups][7] in your area. 
Apache Accumulo developers and community members hang out in the #accumulo 
channel on irc.freenode.net.

## Developer's Guide

See the [developer's guide][5] for recommended practices in interacting with our source code.
Take a look at [Accumulo's Ohloh page][8] for an analysis of the code base.

## Community Interaction

Learn about [building open source communities][6].

## Decision Making

The most important thing about engaging with any Apache project is that everyone
is equal. All people with an opinion are entitled to express that opinion and, where 
appropriate, have it considered by the community.

To some the idea of having to establish consensus in a large and distributed team 
sounds inefficient and frustrating. Don't despair though, The Apache Way has a
set of simple processes to ensure things proceed at a good pace.

In ASF projects we don't like to vote. We reserve that for the few things that need 
official approval for legal or process reasons (e.g. a release or a new committer). 
Most of the time we work with the consensus building techniques documented below.


### Lazy Consensus

[Lazy consensus][2] is the first, and possibly the most important, consensus building 
tool we have. Essentially lazy consensus means that you don't need to get explicit
approval to proceed, but you need to be prepared to listen if someone objects.

### Consensus Building

Sometimes lazy consensus is not appropriate. In such cases it is necessary to
make a proposal to the mailing list and discuss options. There are mechanisms
for quickly showing your support or otherwise for a proposal and 
[building consensus][3] amongst the community.

Once there is a consensus people can proceed with the work under the [lazy 
consensus][2] model.

### Voting

Occasionally a "feel" for consensus is not enough. Sometimes we need to 
have a measurable consensus. For example, when [voting][4] in new committers or 
to approve a release. 


  [1]: /mailing_list.html
  [2]: /governance/lazyConsensus.html
  [3]: /governance/consensusBuilding.html
  [4]: /governance/voting.html
  [5]: /source.html
  [6]: http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/papers/ac2006.2.pdf
  [7]: http://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=accumulo
  [8]: https://www.ohloh.net/p/accumulo