The real work gets done by people like you.

Contributing User

How can you participate? Simply by doing so! We believe in "deeds, not
  words." We operate as a meritocracy, so the more good examples you
contribute, the more you will be allowed to contribute: that is, the better a
developer you prove yourself to be through your actions, the more
value that your solutions will be given. This is not a "Consortium."
There is no such thing as membership. If you contribute examples, then you are a contributing user. It is as simple as that.

Now, in our role as distributors of the work being done by the countless others out on the net, we do have to have some rules. If we just blindly accept any example thrown at us, pretty soon we could stray from the goal of providing a Universally Common Resource and it would become chaotic, Shareware/Freeware that doesn't follow the schema, and that's no good for anybody.


Contributor Examples


The basic premise we intend to operate under is that each example will have a designated owner. That person will be the person who knows the example best, and who feels that they are up to the task of being the arbiter of what should go in to that example, and what shouldn't. Chances are, this person will also be the primary developer. The example contributor accepts responsibility for improvements and bug-fixes from others on the net.

One role of OpenDB User Group is to publicize the lists of contributors examples , so that others who wish to coordinate with them can more easily do so.
Another of OpenDB User Groups functions is to direct incoming patches or bug reports to the right example contributor, in the case where the submitter of the
patch or bug report didn't know who the responsible party was.

In this way, it's a self-regulating system: If an example contributor is viewed
by the public as not doing a good job (perhaps their releases tend to be
buggy, or non-portable, or perhaps they are not responsive to bug fixes or
suggestions) then what will happen is, someone out on the net will say to
themselves (and to us), "hey, I can do a better job than that." And we will say
to them, "go right ahead"

If the usurper and the old example contributor can't work out their differences, then by default, the final decision becomes that of us here  at OpenDB Users Group. We will be in a situation where there are two people asking us to take their version of some particular example, and we're going to pick the better one to include with our example distributions.

Now hopefully it will almost never come to that. In most cases, we won't have to make these kinds of hard decisions, because people will tend to work it out themselves, and cooperate, and accept help when it is offered. There exists years of evidence in the open-source software community that such things tend to work themselves out without a big fuss.

But, we here at OpenDB.org decide what we put in our example distributions that we make    available. So that gives us final say on what we make available.

Of course, anyone anywhere in the world can make their own example distributions: we aren't unique in that respect. And that's another way that the system is self-regulating: if the public believes that we are making bad decisions about what to include and what not to include, about whose work to use and whose not to, or anything of that nature, then the public will vote with their collective feelings by disappearing: they will get their example distributions from someone other than OpenDB.org and we will become irrelevant.

This is the way nearly all successful open-source software projects work, and that's why we are emulating it. Mozilla.org coined the term "Benevolent Dictator"
because there is one person (or organization) who eventually gets final say in the case of disputes, and "Benevolent" because if the dictator stops doing the right thing, the dictator   becomes ignored, and ceases to be a dictator at all.

For those more democratically-minded, another way of looking at it is that the final arbiter really is something of an elected official: the voting process consists of whether anyone listens to them.

The current list of contributing users and their examples can be found here.

What Now
-------------------

So you want to help? Great!

First you need to pick a Project (though you've probably already got some ideas, right?),
and familiarize yourself with how that project will fit into the feature set of PublicPIM.

Please read the rest of the introductory documents on this WEB site, especially the
mission and advocacy documents. After that, it would be a really good idea for you to join the appropriate mailing lists and get a feel for how the community works together.

Before you start developing an example project, we'd strongly recommend that you
let us know about it. If you like, we can publicize the fact that you're working on it, and
perhaps someone else will want to work with you on it. If you don't want it publicized, that's
fine too, but it would help us here at OpenDB.org to know how many different people are tackling the same kinds of projects..