Ways to Get Involved

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

We are looking for people to:

• Provide feedback
• Ask and answer questions on mailing lists
• 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
• 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. Apache defines it this way.

Steps of Involvement

Your first engagement with the project would probably be to subscribe to our mailing lists and to try out cTAKES as a user. If this fits the bill or you see something you'd like to improve then possibly modify code or make other enhancements. After working with the community for a little bit you will be recognized as someone who should have write access. Being a committee member may be in your future. To begin down this path see the Getting Started pages.

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.