Join the Community

Introduction

This chapter is dedicated to readers who are interested in proceeding beyond mere application development and would like to contribute to the further development of the universAAL platform itself.

How to join the platform developer community

First of all, thank you for your interest in joining universAAL's growing community of platform developers. We appreciate your interest in our project and we warmly welcome every new developer who decides to take up the baton. The implementation of the universAAL platform is open source (available under Apache License 2.0) and everyone is free to use, copy, modify and redistribute the platform sources (within the limits of the license). Furthermore, all of the project's design decisions are openly discussed in transparent processes and we would like to invite you to participate in these discussions. Master repositories for the source code, as well as wikis (main source of documentation), and issue management are all currently hosted in the github service.

The universAAL platform developers are mostly organized in so-called Expert Groups. Each Expert Group has its own particular interest. A part of an Expert Group's responsibilities includes the composition of technical reports, and documentation which are available at the Expert Groups' respective Wikis; as well as developing and maintaining software modules devoted to the Expert Group expertise. Each expert group has its own repository (with managed wikis, and issues for discussions and bug reports), but not every repository in the universAAL github organization corresponds to an Expert Group.

Users interested in joining the platform developer community are advised to first get acquainted with the various Expert Groups in order to narrow down their choices. The best way to do this is probably to study the Wikis to get an idea of what exactly each Expert Group does. Once you have decided for a selection of Expert Groups that you would like to join, simply file a join request through the developer mailing list ( dev@universaal.aaloa.org). The first thing you should include in your application is an introduction of yourself, why you are interested and believe your expertise will benefit the unviersAAL platform developer community. Your acceptance will have better chances if backed by active participation in open discussions, documentation (wikis) help, issue submissions, and merge requests.

Make sure that you have acquired sufficient background knowledge in the respective Expert Group's subject area before you participate in their discussions.