How to become a Parabola hacker

The suggestions on the How_to_help article are the best way to begin helping Parabola. This article is specifically about the process of how, in time, one may become a vetted Parabola team member. That is not at all necessary, in order to help or contribute to Parabola. There are many ways that anyone can help, regardless of one's area or level of expertise; and doing so voluntarily, is among one of the most important preconditions before you may be invited to become a "Community" member, or a full "Hacker" member.

• "Community" members shall have total moderation access to the bug tracker, web forum, IRC channel, and possibly write access to specific server areas, such as the artists git repo, or the package repos, as appropriate for the work that is being done.

• "Hacker" members shall have total access to all Parabola infrastructure, including the ability to add/remove the privileges of others. As such, only people with the highest level of community trust, expertise, and long-term dedication to the project, will be considered for full membership.

General Advice

• Make yourself comfortable using Parabola itself. It is difficult to be a developer, writer, or artist unless you are fairly accustomed to using the tools that you are working with. Read documentation, perform typical installations or administrative tasks, and take notice of any usability concerns and bugs.

• Make yourself comfortable using GPG and git. All team members will use those tools regularly. Package maintainers and developers will also need to become adept with the standard building tools. Package maintainers will also need to know how to setup SSH. Sysadmins will need to be very knowledgeable about the entire Parabola system and infrastructure. You don't need to be an expert. One of Parabola's main goals is to educate people on how to hack their system; and we are willing to coach anyone who is interested. Just be willing to learn and to participate on a log-term basis, with a certain amount of dedication.

• Most importantly: be around. Grand plans will not amount to much, unless you stick around and make friends. Participating in mailing list discussions, understanding what constitutes a freedom bug, and reporting the ones you notice, are all essential for building trust. Hang around on the IRC channel, or read the forum when you are online; and get to know the community. Building a rapport and community around Parabola and Free Software is what drives the our project.