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.

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 project's official community is located at dw_antispam.

No CLA is required for membership on this team.

Duties of anti-spam team members:

• Review reports of spam (comments, community entries, or private messages) deleted-and-marked-as-spam
• Determine whether any given report is or is not spam, in accordance with Dreamwidth's rules & team guidelines
• Take appropriate action on reports that are determined to be spam
• Pass along non-spam that is nonetheless actionable under the Terms of Service (such as solicitation for account trades)
• Close non-actionable non-spam (such as mistaken reports or unwanted contact) with no action
• Notice and pass along anything that requires action from a team lead or higher

The spamwhacking process is repetitive and fussy, which means it can be either soothing or tedious depending on personal reactions to fussy repetitive routines.

Addition of new anti-spam team members is sporadic and generally based on current spam volume, and when the volume of spam exceeds the capacity of the current active volunteers. This does mean that it may be a long time between application for the team and any review or response.

Documentation

Documentation involves working on site documentation, like FAQs.

The Dreamwidth community for beginning documentation volunteers is dw_docs_training.

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.