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. We also maintain an informal list of people who are willing to help out any newcomers. 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, defeat daunting bugs and create stunning products, all the while collaborating with people from all around the world.
Are you fluent in multiple languages? By contributing your translations of the text in the user interfaces of KDE software, you can make it more pleasant for you to use, and open it up to millions of potential new users.
Whether you are an artist, a designer, or just someone with an interest in how people interact with software, the KDE community needs you! The VDG help make KDE software both beautiful and usable by helping teams design their user interfaces. This includes creating icons and themes, as well as thinking and researching how to help users do what they are trying to do, instead of getting in the way. By joining this team, you can help make software that makes users happy, and those around them jealous.
Even with the best-designed software, users will need documentation to help them do what they want and get the most out of it. The KDE Community values good-quality documentation, and those who write it. The work of this team has one of the biggest impacts on end-users.
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 would not otherwise have heard of the amazing things we make. You'll be part of a great team of people who are moving the world!
Part of reaching as wide an audience as possible includes making KDE software easy to use for people with visual, auditory and motor disabilities. This is an important area that unfortunately does not get as much love as it deserves. Whether you are familiar with the techniques and technologies involved in this or are just keen to help out, your help will be enthusiastically welcomed.
The KDE BugSquad is the first line of attack for bugs. By keeping track of incoming bug reports, verifying them, improving them and cleaning them up, you will help developers figure out what bugs they need to work on and help them get the information they need to fix them. You don't need any coding knowledge to participate, but experience has shown that members of this team often learn a lot in the course of dealing with bug reports, and many move on to developing the software itself.
