My Open Source Project Contribution

I decided to contribute to Fedora. The Fedora Project builds open source software communities and produces a Linux distribution called Fedora”. They have different kinds of software you can download depending on your need (workstation, server, or cloud). I actually found out about Fedora through my experience at Pearl Hacks. One of the speakers mentioned how to contribute to the Fedora Project so I thought I would check it out.

In order to figure out how to contribute, you have to go to a different link that can’t be found on the main Fedora website. The speaker showed us the link so I was able to find the website. Pictured below is the website you go to if you want to contribute.

The really nice thing about this website is that it makes it easy to find things to do. I was particularly interested in documentation , so I was able to quickly find how to contribute. My contribution to Fedora was helping to improve its tagging system. I had to first make an account with Fedora, but after that, I was able to get started. Once I opened up the webpage, it brought me to a screen pictured below.

I went through each item and looked at the tags associated with the package. In order to get more information about the package, I clicked on the package name. It then opened up a new tab (example picture below).

At this screen, I was able to look around at the description and details of each package. I then went back to the first screen, and I either upvoted/downvoted previous tags based on how relevant they were to the package or entered my own tag. Fedora made contributing to the tagging system very simple and easy to use. One thing that differed from my expectations of open source projects was the lack of supervision. Because I’m so used to a classroom environment where you have teachers around you constantly, I’m not used to working with projects with no guidance at all. Overall, I think contributing to open source projects is rewarding. It’s nice to be a part of community focused on helping each other out. I plan on looking more into Fedora and contributing more to the project as well as other open source projects.