Crowdsourcing the KDE Web Site

The KDE Project is taking a smart approach to reworking the KDE Website. Lydia Pintscher put out the call Sunday for contributors to pitch in with content and screenshots for one or more KDE programs by January 23rd.

KDE apps are broken down into three batches on the wiki. Contributors are asked to pick one (or more) apps and submit a screenshot, and basic information about a project such as its homepage, features, IRC channels, and so forth.

Maintaining a major Web site can be a lot of work, and this is one way to take some of the heavy lifting off the major contributors. Producing a single page is not too difficult, but the cumulative effort is quite a bit if only done by a few contributors.

If you're a KDE user and want to give back to the project, this is an easy way to help out.

It's also a good template for other projects when trying to get help from the community. Many project have "junior jobs that are a good entry point into the project.

Just calling for help can be intimidating for new contributors. Where to start? What should I do? Who do I approach? By identifying specific tasks and projects, it can be much easier for projects to find contributors and ease them into the community.

There's still quite a few programs to claim on the KDE wiki. The deadline is January 23rd, and more information is available on the www-rework page.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FLOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.