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How To Contribute to Referendum

I hope you will consider helping the referendum project. Think about all those online communities you belong to, and the way each individual's face will brighten when your new feature makes their life more carefree. Eiffel programmers in particular should read How the Referendum project can help the Eiffel Community

Next, think of something you'd like to do. You can either check out the Referendum task list, or scratch your own particular itch, whatever you think the project could use. Then you'll want to join the development mailing list, check out the cvs module and start hacking. You might also consider hosting a referendum server.

Time Trading

In theory, I am a coding machine willing to help you out in every possible way with your task, by explaining details of the program architecture or answering questions, whatever. Only, I am a lot more likely to help you out if I'm sure my time won't be wasted. I mean, it would kind of suck if I spent an hour documenting some part of the code for you and then you went off and watched reruns of The Monkeys for the next year of your life.

So I've come up with a method called Time Trading, by which we agree that I'll spend a certain amount on your project, then you agree to spend a certain amount. Since I probably know a lot more about referendum than you, it makes sense that my time spent be less than yours. For example, I spend 30 minutes, you spend two hours; I spend 1 hour you spend 5. It's not set in stone; Propose something.

I'm not saying if you mail a question to the devel list that I won't answer it or anything, just that, for larger projects, we can both optimize our time spent by entering into such a completely informal contract. I hope to use referendum as a testbed for the whole time-trading method, so please let me know what you think.

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