How can I help the Community

If you want to help and contribute to the OS/2 Community there is a lot you can do. It does not matter if you have time or not. There are also some activities that can only took you some minutes of your week.

Here are some suggestions.

Contribute to the OS2World Wiki
This wiki is open for contributions. To have a account on this wiki just register on the main OS2World page and with the same user and password you will have access to the forum and wiki.

The good things about the wiki is that you can help improve other work or submit your own, so it does not matter if you have just a few minutes, you can contribute.

This are some suggestion of what you can do on the wiki.
 * Submit your OS/2 screenshots to the OS2World Wiki
 * Submit an article to the Wiki
 * Create a page of you favourite OS/2 software in this wiki.

Contribute on the Forums
There are several forums on the Internet about OS/2 and eComStation.
 * OS2World has one where you can collaborate with other community members.
 * OS2.org has also a recognized forum for German speaking.
 * There are some comp.os.os2 groups on the USENET with some activity.

Upload Contents to Hobbes


Hobbes is our central repository of files, but sometime there are some software missing there. You can help on hobbes by:
 * Uploading some OS/2 files that are missing.
 * Re-organizing something that is not well documented or located in the wrong directory.

Submit News to the OS/2 Community
Sometime we may miss some OS/2 news, that's why users can also submit news. There are three well known procedures to upload news:
 * Submit news through OS2World.com
 * Submit news through OS/2 Warp News and Rumors site.
 * Submit news through eComStationnews.com

Join the Open Source Abandonware Campaign
OS/2 has a lot of old software. There is an on going campaign to try to contact developers and ask him to release their source code as open source. You can ask help on this to Martín Itúrbide. He is always interested on having more open source software on this platform.
 * Just select one random contributor to this platform.
 * Check if you like their software.
 * And if it is not open source, try to track the author from all the social networks or google it.
 * Once you track it, kindly ask if he can open source it.

Martín's log for this campaign is located here: Open Source Campaign

Test Java Applications on OS/2
You can also help testing Java applications on this platform and report that are working or not on the OS2World.com forum thread. Fell free to post your problems and screenshots there.

Help a Developer
You can also team up with a developer to help him out with:
 * Testing applications
 * Writing Documentation
 * Helping him to organize the release files
 * etc.

Improve some Open Source OS/2 Software
Open source is the only way we can mitigate the risk of software turning into abandonware. And after IBM's plugging the plug on us we found out why open source it is important.

So, if you have some development skills go ahead and help us with more open source software from this platform.

Some suggestions:
 * The EDM/2 Wiki has a lot of resource for developers
 * Try to use open source development software on this platform like GCC and OpenWatcom
 * Do your development on the public. Upload your source code on GitHub or SourceForge
 * Get some source code inspiration from the OS2World GitHub repository
 * Always submit a news to the community once you build a new release.

Port open source software to OS2
Porting open source software to this platform is also a good way to contribute. GCC and Qt4 on OS/2 has helped us to port a lot of software.

Write a Development Article
The EDM/2 Wiki accepts Wiki articles too. You are free to write a tutorial about anything related to OS/2 development.

Need Ideas?
Sure, on this community there are more requirements than developers, so there are a lot of ideas out there:
 * Check out Comments and Suggestions about eComStation User Experience
 * XWorkplace needs some help too.
 * Netlabs Wiki has also some random interesting ideas.