<p>Users are community members who have a need for OREKIT. They are the
most important members of the community and without them OREKIT would
have no purpose. Anyone can be a user; there are no special
requirements.</p>
<p>OREKIT asks its users to participate in the project and community as
much as possible. The objective of the users’ contributions is to enable
OREKIT to be in phase with the needs of the users. Common user
contributions include (but are not limited to):</p>
<ul>
<li>evangelizing about OREKIT (e.g. a link on a website and
word-of-mouth awareness raising)</li>
<li>informing developers of strengths and weaknesses from a new user
perspective</li>
<li>providing moral support (a ‘thank you’ goes a long way)</li>
<li>providing financial support (the software is open source, but its
developers need to eat)</li>
</ul>
<p>Users who continue to engage with OREKIT and its community will often
become more and more involved. Such users may find themselves becoming
contributors, as described in the next section.</p>
<h3data-number="2.1.2"id="contributors-and-active-contributors"><spanclass="header-section-number">2.1.2</span> Contributors and active contributors</h3>
<p>Contributors are community members who contribute in concrete ways to
OREKIT. Anyone can become a contributor and contributions can take many
forms, such as those outlined below and in the above section on users.
There is no expectation of commitment to the project, no specific skill
requirements and no selection process. In addition to their actions as
users, contributors will also find themselves doing one or more of the
following:</p>
<ul>
<li>supporting new users (existing users are often the best people to
support new users)</li>
<li>reporting bugs</li>
<li>identifying requirements</li>
<li>providing graphics and web design</li>
<li>programming</li>
<li>assisting with project infrastructure</li>
<li>writing documentation</li>
<li>fixing bugs</li>
<li>adding features</li>
</ul>
<p>Contributors must clearly notify they agree with the fact that their
patches will be integrated in OREKIT under APACHE V2.0 license. For
this, they have to tick the appropriate box when they attach their patch
to a bug report in the anomaly management tool in order to confirm that
their contribution will be governed by the APACHE V2.0 license terms and
conditions, otherwise their contribution will not be part of OREKIT.</p>
<p>Contributors engage with OREKIT through the issue tracker and mailing
list, or by writing or editing documentation. They submit changes to the
project itself via <ahref="http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/softwarepatch">patches</a>,
which will be considered for inclusion in the project by existing
committers (see next section). The developer mailing list is the most
appropriate place to ask for help when making that first
contribution.</p>
<p>As contributors gain experience and familiarity with the project,
their profile within, and commitment to, the community will increase. At
some stage, they may find themselves being nominated for committership,
as described in the next section.</p>
<p>An active contributor is a contributor who has:</p>
<ul>
<li>a valid e-mail address attached to his profile</li>
<li>in the last 12 months contributed in concrete ways to OREKIT</li>
<li>a maximum delay of reactivity of 3 weeks under solicitation</li>
