How to be a helpful member of CSTART
From CSTART Wiki
Contents |
[edit] Non-Technical
The following ways to be a helpful member of CSTART require no special technical knowledge. Anybody can do them!
[edit] Raise Awareness
The most useful thing that any member of CSTART can do is to help raise awareness of CSTART's existence and goals. Whenever you meet somebody who you think might be interested in CSTART, especially someone with skills we may be able to use, mention our website to them (but don't constantly pester people who clearly aren't interested; this will only give us a bad reputation). The more people who know about CSTART, the easier it is for us to recruit new members and raise funds. CSTART hopes to have promotional flyers available for download soon; you can help raise awareness by posting these flyers at your university or workplace.
[edit] Donate Money
The backbone of CSTART is formed by the ideas, dreams, and dedication of its active members, but the unfortunate reality is that we need money, too. Initial planning and design work is cheap, but eventually we will need to begin physical construction and testing, which will cost money. Money also allows us to organize grants, prizes, and contracts to further our aims and to send CSTART delegates to open space-related conferences around the world.
[edit] Tidy up the Wiki
Anybody who has a little spare time and patience can help to tidy up our Wiki. Correct any spelling and grammatical errors you find, fix broken links, add links to external sites that help explain technical concepts, make sure our Wiki page names make consistent use of capitalization, add appropriate category tags to uncategorised pages, and anything else you can think of. If you rename a page, make sure you either change all the pages that link to it or set up a redirect!
[edit] Technical
The following ways to be a helpful member of CSTART may require some degree of special technical knowledge (not necessarily in science or engineering - business and legal concerns count too!). Don't forget that people with technical skills are still capable of doing all the the non-technical helpful things above as well!
[edit] Check the open task list for your favourite project
All CSTART projects have a list of open tasks, with Wiki page names of the form "PROJECT Open Tasks" (e.g. CLLARE Open Tasks). These pages list various tasks for that project which require attention. Depending on the state of the project, these tasks could be quite broad, initial investigation type tasks or very specific problems. If you find an open task that you are interested in, check the relevant Wiki pages and forum discussion to get a better feel for what is required. If you feel like you can contribute to this task, post your plans or ideas in the relevant section of the forum. Note that ideas should be raised in the forums first and entered into the Wiki only when they are met with rough agreement on the forums.
