Read the introductory post here first.
So, you found an open source project you really like, it saves you a lot of time, takes some friction away from your life, saves you money and you’re full of admiration and gratitude to the people who spend their free time working on it, so that you can stand on their shoulders. You feel like you really should give back to them, or to the (rest of the) community around the project, but you don’t really want or can do the obvious – start fixing bugs or implementing new features, so you don’t. But is it the only way to contribute to the project? Hardly – you can be of great help to the project without writing a single line of code, and dedicating just a tiny fraction of your time to contributing.
Give feedback
The smallest thing you can do to contribute is give feedback. Developers working on every healthy open source project are constantly looking for users feedback. How would you like a feature to work? How do you like the current feature set? What would be the feature you’d like to see the most in vNext? What behavior in this or that corner case would you find more logical? These the kinds of questions that tend to be asked by the developers to the community, and by speaking your mind on these issues you’re helping the developers make the right decisions.
Some project have set up dedicated websites, using uservoice.com where it’s incredibly simple to give feedback – you just click. For more elaborate questions discussion groups, or project blogs are used to ask open questions to the community. Take a moment of your time to write a few sentences to shed some light on your perspective on the matter. This may not seem like much but giving feedback is the most important thing in ensuring that the project progresses in the right direction.
Help others
For commercial software where there’s a big company behind the product, there are usually people hired to build up the body of knowledge about the product. They write documentation, they write articles in magazines, they blog extensively, speak on conferences write books, answer questions on forums etc. Open source projects have usually just a few volunteers writing code, documentation, blogging, answering questions, all at once and on top of that – they do it in their own free (as in speech) time.
What you can do, is to dedicate some of your own time to take some of the non-coding off of their shoulders. Do subscribe to discussion group of your favorite project, or to your favorite Q&A website where people ask for solutions of their problems with the project. If you see someone asking a question that you know the answer for – do answer. This won’t usually require a lot of time, and someone will be very grateful to you. Also this has another aspect – by stating clearly what you know, or think you know you’re learning better the product itself – you’re building up your expertise and gain recognition and respect in the community. This is especially visible on sites like StackOverflow.com where for giving good answers you’re rewarded with points.
Write documentation
If you find some aspect of using the project hard, and the documentation is not very helpful – improve the documentation. Many projects keep their documentation in the form of a wiki, which means that you’re free to edit and improve it. After all – the documentation is the place where everyone is the most likely to look for solutions in the first place. Help keep it up to date. Help it cover the areas you struggled with. If you blogged your problem – you’ve done most of the hard work already. Add parts of your blog post to the documentation, ensuring that they fit with the rest of the documentation and its rules.
It’s not only the code
Open Source projects are not only the coding and documentation – it’s also all the ‘meta’ stuff. If you can help improving the website of the project. Write the copy. Improve the design of the website. Design logo. This all is important stuff, although often there’s no person to take care of that.
Blog, speak on User Group meetings
If you have a blog – do write about the project. Post solutions event to what after the fact may seem as the most trivial problem. If it took you 15 minutes to figure out, it is worth posting about. You’ll be surprised how many people will find your post helpful.
If you like the project – get others involved. Speak on your local user group meeting about it, show what you like about it, how it helped you, why you like it. By advocating good project you’re getting others involved. You’re expanding the community which means more people learn about it, use it and ultimately more people contribute to the project.
Donate money
Open source projects are free to use, but they certainly are not free to develop and maintain. Contributing with your wallet can be very effective way of helping the project progress, yet many people don’t even consider this. Small amounts to cover hosting costs, costs of hardware bandwidth etc may make make a whole world of difference to the maintainers of the project.
Also developing software often requires software which is not free. You want project X to support version Y of Z? Donating money so that the developers can purchase the license of Z can be a great way of contributing. That is especially true on the Microsoft stack, which consists almost entirely of commercial software.
On the larger scale donating can help someone to start working full time on certain aspects of the project to make what would otherwise be impossible, possible. Probably the most famous example of this is IMeta corporation, which donated one of their top developers to work full time for several months on bringing LINQ support to NHibernate.