Title: Contribute
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# Join the Apache Directory Community

First of all, a big **thank you** from us for evaluating and/or using our products. We truly appreciate it. Our products exist, and continue to improve thanks to you. 
But you can help us and yourself more!

As we are a community of volunteers working with the guidelines and policies of the Apache Software Foundation (the Apache Way) in mind, we welcome any kind of input you can provide to get better products. 
These contributions, whether you think of reporting bugs, supplying code enhancements, improvements to our documentation, answering questions in our mailing lists or anywhere else are valuable to us. Because these will help us in helping you.

You can also consider **donating** in other ways to the Apache Software Foundation. Look for more information on that subject at these pages: [resource donation](http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html) or [sponsorship program](http://apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html).

So, you consider **contributing** to our project. But how do you go about achieving this? 

Well, it is as easy as pie. The first thing you need to do is to subscribe to one of our mailing lists (see the overview below, or look here: [mailing lists](mailing-lists-and-irc.html)) and you are set to go to deliver your first contribution: a posting there, about how great our product are, what you found missing, or even the bug you're confronted with.
You might even consider a more interactive approach and join the team on our **IRC** channels.

After you have had your first contribution over and done with, it stays **easy**. You can:

* reply to questions, and/or share your viewpoint on how to get issues resolved,
* add to our FAQ or WIKI,
* share your code and document patches through our [issue tracking system - JIRA](issue-tracking.html),
* evaluate bugs and proposed improvements provided by others in our team,
* help with outlining and evaluating the future direction of our project and the development iterations of our products.

To make it a bit more explicit, **we are looking for**:

* Source code (bugs and improvements) contributions
* Documentation assistance
* Product and feature suggestions
* Detailed and constructive feedback
* Articles (case studies, white papers, etc) and presentations (speeches) about how our products helped you.

But the list is not limited to the above! If you feel we missed something there, please **let us know**.

**Our mailing lists**

| Name | Subscribe |  Post | Archive |
|---|:-:|:-:|:-:|
| The Directory Developers List | [Subscribe](mailto:dev-subscribe@directory.apache.org) | [Post](mailto:dev@directory.apache.org) | [mail-archives.apache.org](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/directory-dev) |
| The Directory Users List| [Subscribe](mailto:users-subscribe@directory.apache.org) | [Post](mailto:users@directory.apache.org) | [mail-archives.apache.org](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/directory-users)  |
| The Directory Commits List | [Subscribe](mailto:commits-subscribe@directory.apache.org) |  — | [mail-archives.apache.org](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/directory-commits) |
| The LDAP API List | [Subscribe](mailto:api-subscribe@directory.apache.org) |  [Post](mailto:api@directory.apache.org) | [mail-archives.apache.org](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/directory-api) |

Our IRC channels on  freenode.net, where we have also informal discussions:

* Users IRC channel: [#apache-directory @ irc://irc.freenode.net](irc://irc.freenode.net/apache-directory) 
* Developers IRC channel: [#apache-directory-dev @ irc://irc.freenode.net](irc://irc.freenode.net/apache-directory-dev) 
* Fortress IRC channel: [#apache-fortress @ irc://irc.freenode.net](irc://irc.freenode.net/apache-fortress) 

Again, we thank you and look forward to seeing your first contribution.

**The Apache Directory Community**