openSUSE is developed in the open, and everybody can join in. If you wish to participate actively in openSUSE or other free software projects, there are plenty of things to do. Finding something that matches your interests, available time and your skills should be no problem at all.


The first steps to getting involved is to follow the news and getting to know the community.

Consider following these sources. These and more relevant news feeds are preconfigured in the Akregator RSS-reader which is installed by default and is part of the Kontact suite:
http://news.opensuse.org
http://planetsuse.org

You should also join some of the mailinglists, this is the primary form of communication for the project, -announce, -project, -kde and -factory are some of the major ones, that most would want to subscribe to:
http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate/Mailinglists

Consider hanging out in some IRC channels, where much communication and coordination takes place, as well as regular meetings.
http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate/IRC

If you don't have the time to keep up on a daily basis, you can follow the weekly news instead - it's a digest of the most important happenings on blogs, mailinglists etc. for the last week:
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News

This is just a brief summary of some of the areas where you can contribute while helping to shape the distribution and having a lot of fun.

Once you have familiarized yourself with openSUSE, you'll quickly be able to help new users in the forums, IRC or mailinglists. Apart from helping others, you will learn a lot yourself in the process.

There's a marketing team working on promoting openSUSE in various ways, which you can join or even become an official openSUSE ambassador.
http://en.opensuse.org/Marketing_Team
http://en.opensuse.org/Ambassador

The openSUSE wiki is always in need of new articles, or clenup of existing ones.
http://en.opensuse.org/Wiki_Team

Translate the openSUSE distribution and/or wiki to your native language.
http://i18n.opensuse.org

If you're an artist you can create icons and other artwork for the distribution, marketing, websites and so forth.
http://en.opensuse.org/Artwork

You can help test the development versions of upcoming openSUSE releases.

You'll find the roadmap here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Roadmap

Get the latest development version here:
http://software.opensuse.org/developer

Read this before reporting bugs:
http://en.opensuse.org/Submitting_Bug_Reports

You can request new features for openSUSE here, or vote for (or against) existing requests:
http://features.opensuse.org

The availability of as many as possible, high quality binary packages is crucial for any distribution. You can build packages on the openSUSE Build Service and even maintain packages in the official distribution:
http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service
http://en.opensuse.org/Factory/Packaging
http://en.opensuse.org/Junior_Jobs

If you're a programmer you can contribute code to fix bugs or add features e.g. in YaST or other components developed by the openSUSE project itself - and of course if you contribute code to upstream projects, openSUSE will benefit from this too - eventually.

openSUSE needs fast and reliable mirrors to host ISOs and repositories in all parts of the world, to ensure that users have a good experience, if you work in a university or similar, maybe you can help out.
http://en.opensuse.org/Mirror_Setup_Howto

Everybody needs money, and openSUSE is no exception. If you buy the boxset or merchandise, you'll help support openSUSE financially.
http://en.opensuse.org/Buy_openSUSE
http://shop.opensuse.org/