Why and How

SciDAVis lives from your contributions

This project is entirely run by means of voluntary contributions people make in their spare time. Since all project-related resources are hosted by SourceForge.net free of charge and membership is also free, the only investment we make and we ask you to make if you're using SciDAVis is some time.

There's many good reasons for contributing, including:

• Adapting SciDAVis to your needs without having to port your changes to new versions.

• You make sure that the software you're using will continue to be improved and maintained. The more people contribute, the less likely it is that the project will be abandoned.

• You can influence (through words and actions) the direction the project is taking.

• The decision what, when and how much to contribute is up to you, so you could actually have some fun along the way (we certainly do :-)). Before you start, you should announce your plans on scidavis-contributors though, so we're not doing the same work twice and to see how your ideas fit in with everybody else's plans.

• Particularly if you're using a lot of free software, you can see it as a chance to give something back to the community at large.

• You can acquire skills that might be useful for your job, on the technical as well as on the social side (hard and soft skills).

Yes, yes, I'd like to -- but how?

There's many ways in which you can contribute, and only one or two of them require any programming knowledge. Depending on your skills and the amount of time you are willing to invest, you can provide help on the forum, improve or write documentation, report bugs, suggest features, translate SciDAVis into a new language or update an existing translation, package SciDAVis for your favorite distribution or platform, write new features, create artwork (icons, splash screen, mascot), etc., etc.

Some of the above require additional explanations to get you started. Please see the submenu to the left for available documents. We plan to expand these pages in the future, in order to better help you to help us. :-)