An active community of users and developers supports Evergreen. You don’t need to be a coder or technical expert to contribute; you just need time and a desire to improve Evergreen. As an open source system, Evergreen is as strong as the community that supports it. With a large core of volunteers committed to contributing code, reporting bugs, creating documentation, supporting the web site and other communication mechanisms, and speaking up on the issues that are dear to their hearts, Evergreen becomes stronger for the libraries and users who depend on it.
Connect
We invite you to join us in the many different forums in which we discuss the Evergreen project. Most of our communication is done through mailing lists and the Evergreen IRC channel. Visit our communications page for information on how to connect with others in the community.
Social media is also a great way to connect with others in the community. We are on Twitter as @EvergreenILS. We use the #evgils for a community wide hashtag and add a number, representing the year, to it for our conference each year. For example, the 2021 Evergreen International Conference used #evgils21 as the hashtag. We are also available on Facebook as EvergreenILS.
Is your library/consortium on the Evergreen libraries page? Add your site to the list so that we can include you in statistics on the number of libraries using Evergreen.
We also invite you to attend or present at an Evergreen conference or event. Conferences are a great way to meet others in the Evergreen community and to connect faces to names.
Help Others
Have you ever had a question answered on the mailing lists or in IRC? It’s time to return the favor. Those questions are answered by community volunteers like you who are willing to help out other users and/or are willing to share their experiences. Keep an eye on the messages sent through the list and log into IRC even when you don’t have a question that needs answering. If somebody posts a question that you can help with, don’t be shy. Share your expertise and experiences. By answering a question quickly, you may be saving another user hours of continued troubleshooting.
Documentation
The Documentation Interest Group (DIG) is working hard to keep the official documentation up to date, but they can always benefit from the work of more contributors. Have you ever been frustrated because a feature in Evergreen has never been documented? Is there an area of documentation that you think could be improved? If so, help us out by contributing some documentation on the feature.
Volunteers can also help out DIG with the following tasks:
- Comparing existing documentations with the features they describe
- Ensuring documentation is clear and follows DIG style guide conventions
- AsciiDoc conversion
- CSS design to make the documentation more attractive and user friendly
To get started, take a look at DIG’s participation page at http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-docs:dig_participation.
Testing Code
There are many Evergreen bugs and wishlist items that have code waiting to be tested. Sandboxes are available in the community for anyone to test new code. Fill out a Sandbox Request form at any time to get access to a server with the test code added to it. Read more information on testing code for Evergreen.
Translation
We depend on volunteers to translate the Evergreen staff client and public catalog into different languages. If you need to implement Evergreen in a language that is not yet supported, please help us with our translation efforts. You can see view the status of translations of different languages at https://translations.launchpad.net/evergreen. See our internationalization, localization and globalization page to get started, our Evergreen translations page for information on the translations workflow and tips and tricks for translators, and our localization technical details page for technical backend details on Evergreen translations.
Code Contributions
Fixing bugs and adding enhancements to Evergreen are great ways to get involved in the community. If you’ve created a local customization that might be useful for other Evergreen sites, please contribute it back to the community so that all Evergreen users can benefit from it. All code contributions are made through the Evergreen bug tracker on Launchpad. Read our procedures and conventions for contributing to the Evergreen project to get started.
Funding Development
Many Evergreen sites contribute to the project by funding development through a third-party contractor. Be sure to share your ideas with the Evergreen community through the general mailing list before seeking a contractor. You can also check the Evergreen Proposed Development Projects page to see if another site is already planning work on the same idea or check Launchpad to see if a developer has begun working on a similar project. The Proposed Development Projects page is also a great place to see if there are interesting projects seeking funding partners.