How to be a helpful member of CSTART

[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 non-project work

The following ways to be a helpful member of CSTART may require some degree of special technical knowledge, but are not specifically related to any one CSTART project. Don't forget that people with technical skills are still capable of doing all the the non-technical helpful things above as well!

[edit] Read and write technical reports

The CSTART Technical Report System aims to be a repository of Creative Commons licensed technical documents on all aspects of astronautics. If you have good technical knowledge of anything that you feel is of value to the CSTART organisation (such as rocketry, astrodynamics, navigation, life support, telecommunications, etc.) then you can be a great help by reading existing technical reports and fixing errors, expanding stubs, etc. and also by writing new technical reports to fill gaps in the knowledge base provided by the TRS.

[edit] Test, fix or write software

The CSTART Software Library is a collection of computer programs developed by the CSTART community to assist in the planning and management of CSTART projects. You can be a great help to CSTART by testing and improving software already in the library, and also by writing new pieces of software. You can post bug reports, feature requests or ideas for new programs in the CSTART forums for feedback from the community.

[edit] Project work

The process for contributing to work on specific CSTART projects is currently undergoing significant changes, which you can read about at the Project Lifecycle, Project Management Process and Engineering Process wiki pages. While these changes are in process, there isn't really an official way to contribute to individual projects. However, if you have feedback or ideas for projects, discussing these in the forums will certainly attract attention and will ensure that once our processes are tidied up, your ideas will be followed up on.