Volunteering

Dreamwidth places a big emphasis on its volunteers, who can help in a variety of areas across the site. For information on why we think volunteers are awesome, you can read the page about our Volunteer philosophy and the Guide to happy and effective volunteering.

We welcome all volunteers who want to contribute to Dreamwidth and have a commitment to Inclusiveness.

General Volunteering Information

If you want to volunteer in any area where you will produce code or text for the site (FAQs etc.), you will need to fill out a Contributor Licensing Agreement.

There are several areas in which we need volunteers. Information on who leads the projects and how they can be contacted can generally be accessed on the Project Teams page.

See also Volunteer Opportunities.

Some areas are suitable for just diving right in and getting started without many formalities.

Some areas need a little more interaction to get started effectively.

Accessibility

Accessibility on Dreamwidth is the process of making the site and everything related to it accessible to everyone, no matter their requirements. The official LJ community for that project is dw_accessibility.

Anti-Spam

We are trying to keep Dreamwidth as clear from spam as possible. This means that all reports of spam should be seen to as quickly as possible, to help avoid spammers gaining a toehold in the site. This project's official community is located at dw_antispam, and instructions for application are on the community profile. See the Anti-Spam Getting Started article for more information!

Documentation

Documentation involves working on site documentation, like FAQs.

The Dreamwidth community for beginning documentation volunteers is dw_docs_training.

Anyone can point out areas of the site which are not documented, or where the documentation is out of date, incorrect, or could be better.

If you submit draft documentation, plan to submit a CLA so it can be used.

A documentation team lead or site admin will review all submitted documentation for accuracy and adherence to the site documentation style, and edit as needed before posting.

Development

This involves working on the code Dreamwidth is based on. You can find out information about this in the Development category, specifically in the Dev Getting Started article. For non-coding involvement with development, see How to do a Code Tour.

The Dreamwidth community for beginning development volunteers is dw_dev_training, which includes a masterlist of bugs for beginners. The dedicated IRC channel is #dreamwidth-dev.

Styles

Styles encompasses things like designing new layouts for Dreamwidth, creating mood themes, documentation of existing styles, and so forth. Dreamwidth's styles team community is located at dw_styles.

You can get more information at the Styles and Design Getting Started page.

Support

Dreamwidth's Support Board is an area that's run by volunteers. If you want to start answering questions, reading the Support guide is recommended. A Getting Started page is in the works - for the time being, if you'd like more detail your best bet is to grab someone in IRC, including the specific project channel #dreamwidth-support.

The Dreamwidth community for beginning support volunteers is dw_support_training.

Wiki

This wiki is designed to be a helpful resource for people wanting to use Dreamwidth, help with Dreamwidth, or read about Dreamwidth. Wiki Getting Started is an introduction to wikis as a concepts; the Wiki Tasklist contains small repeating tasks, and a list of larger projects. The dw_wiki community also lists official tasks.

Other than that, if you have knowledge about any specific area related to Dreamwidth, feel free to look around the site and dive in.