[tor-dev] Volunteering

[Damian Johnson]

> Hi,
>
> I've been directed to this email address by Matt in regards to volunteering
> for the project. Currently I work as a consultant that specialises in
> providing hosted services to my clients. I am a keen learner of technology
> and have learnt (mostly self taught) various languages (C/C++, python,
> Java), where I would like to further improve my knowledge through
> volunteering for the Tor project.
>
> I've browsed through the list of project currently available and have
> watched the video, although I cannot decide which project currently
> interests me the most. In the past I had used Vidalia when I worked in China
> with some limited success, which could be something that I can look to help
> upon if possible.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jialu

Hi Jialu, glad you want to get involved! Adding tor-dev@ in case the
wider community wants to chime in with ideas. The first step of
getting involved is to figure out what strikes your fancy and that,
obviously, nobody but you can decide. ;)

Since you mentioned Vidalia one thing you might want to consider is if
you like to work on projects alone or collaborate with others. I
include the 'Activity' column on...

https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Projects

... so you can easily determine for any given project if you would be
working with others or adopting a space all your own. Vidalia is
firmly in the later camp. Nobody has been actively working on Vidalia
for almost a year since chiiph departed.

If GUIs strike your fancy then a project you might want to consider is
a new stem-based UI. This is an idea we've been batting around for a
while now but has yet to get off the ground. Kamran created a python
GTK UI a few years back as part of GSoC...

http://inspirated.com/2011/07/17/summer-of-code-progress-garm-0-1

This piggybacked on arm, but since his work our controller libraries
have greatly improved to a point where we should be able to make a
solid, new Tor GUI without that sort of kludge. Like Vidalia, though,
nobody else is working in this space so it would involve taking the
lead on a new project of your own.

If any of the projects on the volunteer table strike your fancy then
my best suggestion is to dive in and get involved. Try to fix a minor
issue or two then reach out to the maintainer mentioned on the table.

Cheers! -Damian