How to Contribute to dair.ai?

Welcome!

First of all, thanks for your interest to contribute to our initiatives. This page contains more information about how to get involved. Regardless if you are a newcomer or already an experienced member of the community, there are different ways you can contribute to the different projects: from helping to maintain individual projects to becoming an editor to leading research efforts. We are here to help mentor you and guide your ability to produce high-impact work for our communities.

Before you get started on your journey with us, here are a few tips:

• Watch this video recording that provides more details about some of our ongoing projects. Note that the notes/doc we used during the video recording has been moved to this Wiki page. Essentially, this Wiki is now our canonical source that includes all information about our teams, projects, and how to contribute.
• The next step is to learn a little about our ongoing projects. There are various ways to familiarize yourself with our projects. You can directly go to our GitHub organization page and click on the individual projects to find out more about each project's roadmap and progress. We also try to provide as much guidance on how you can contribute to each individual project. Remember to come back here once you become familiar with our work.
• Feeling overwhelmed? Don't be! All the work you see here is possible by contributions from amazing people spread across the globe. Most of the work is done remotely and at your own pace. We want you to use this opportunity as a way to grow, learn, and help give back to the community. We provide necessary guidance and mentoring. Some people get started very slow by helping us maintain the individual project repositories and others jump straight into publishing articles and paper summaries. There are so many different ways we can collaborate. Below we share some more tips on how to get started.

Tips to quickly get started

• At this point, you may already be interested in a project or two. But it could also be that you have a ton of questions. Well, there is also a place you can ask us questions directly and interact with us. You can join our Slack group and ask us anything in the #contribute or #help channels. Don't forget to say hi in the #general channel.
• Once you have spotted a project or two that you are interested to contribute to, the next step is simple. You head over to our main GitHub Project where we manage all project tasks and issues. The first step before getting started is to locate the project in the "Genesis" column. Then are you are expected to follow the corresponding “Add your name to the contributors list” issue of the project you are interested in. You can do this for all the projects you want to help with. All you need to do is to provide your name and GitHub username in the comment section of the issue so that we can add you to the project and you are able to submit changes to the repository.
• Now you know about the projects but you may still be wondering how you can contribute to the individual projects. These are my suggestions:
  • Ask in the corresponding slack channels with a simple "Hi I am X. I am experienced with Y. I would love to help! How can I do so?" message. Someone will get back to you soon.
  • You can also go directly to the GitHub Project management page and look for tasks/issues that need resolving for the individual projects you are interested in.
  • Lastly, the project GitHub repository includes all the necessary information for the different projects, including roadmap, schedule, team information, etc.
• That's a huge step and we appreciate your commitment. Remember that you contribute what you can. We are constantly adding new projects and you are free to move between projects. Just make sure to reach out or add your name to the corresponding issue of that project. If you are moving to other projects, let your teammates know.
• At this point, you may already a good idea of what you want to work on. Always make sure to check out our GitHub Project for updates on new tasks/issues that need to be resolved. If you are getting started, we advise you to look out for the "good first issue" tag and work on those tasks. They are meant to be short and quick ways to help out with different projects.
• As you build confidence, you start to get involved with bigger tasks. If you want to take on a task and need mentoring or guidance, reach out to more experienced members in the team. We are here to help each other. If you get stuck or feel overwhelmed at any point in time, always feel free to ask questions if something is not clear. Some projects will move faster than others and that is expected.
• Congratulations! You are now on an official active, individual contributor to the dair.ai initiative and we look forward to all your contributions and ideas.

What's next?

As you become familiar with our process and our vision, you may want to take on bigger responsibilities and roles. Some have shown interest to devote more time to help with editing/reviewing publications, some want to become researchers, tech leads, technology advocates, moderators, developers, organizers, and so on. If interested, then please check out the Roles page for more information.