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Now is the hour for every good man...

1. Advocacy and PR

   The amount of what Independence will be able to do depends on how many people will work on it. People with writing skills could improve the texts where Independence goals are described, write on magazines or speak about Independence on mail lists with similar goals to ours. This could have a significant influence on the number of Independence's developpers and of its users. By increasing Indy's influence we hope to get other distributions paying more attention to those users they presently ignore.

2. Web desgin

   This is also a crucial position for Indy's impact and would have to be done in conjunction with the advocacy team as well as the developers. We frown on HTML written with Wysywyg tools as such tends to be bad and prone to break as soon as a page is moved. However the primary goal of a web site is to be the vehicle of a message.

   For those interested in web-development, a tarball of the website is available from http://cran.mit.edu/~donovan/indy.tar.gz. It is updated nightly by a cron job, and should be seen as the "official" distribution of the website.

   More information for people wishing to contribute to the website is available here.

3. Organization

   This is something I am a complete disaster for it. Managing people, setting a CVS if needed, ensuring we are mirrorred not only would be better done than by me but would allow me to concentrate on other tasks

4. RPM building or maintenance

   Building RPMS is not particularly difficult and is mostly a task of recompiling the software and listing the files it installs plus writing 10 lines install scripts. However at Indy we strive for building RPMS who make the program as plug and play as possible and have definite ideas about where the installed files should go.

   If you are unexperienced at RPM-building you could still maintain some of them. Most of Indy's RPMS are clean in that sense that when building they won't pollute your file system and don't need you being root for building them. That means that if the original source didn't need patches for Indy then the only thing you have to do is download the new version of the software, change the version number in the spec file you got with the old SRPM and then "rpm -ba myspecfile". Easy isn't it? But you would relieve some burden from other people.

5. Software selection

   We strongly believe that an intelligent software selection is the most important factor for making Linux easy and useful. If you know a program who is better than its equivalent in Indy just tell us. If you know a program who has no equivalent in Indy and covers a need you think important then tell us.

   We are interested by games, programs for real life (eg managing a check book), internetting in dial up sites, improving integration in companies who use Windows or Macs, easying system administration, Wysywyg word processors and software for graphics or music creation. We also would like to give a little push to the amount of software available for Linux in those areas we think important for Linux future: games, office applications, end user software. So we would like to provide visual programming tools to programmers coming from Windows and of course we would like to include Crystal Space or a similar game design engine in order to help increase the number of games available for Linux.

   Independence being a free project it cannot ship commercial software. We also shun software who is crippled until you have paid the license but we accept software where the N-1 version is free and the N version is not (eg ghostscript). Software who is free only for personal use is something we accept... if there is no alternative. Finally a program who can only distributed without fee is a no-no-no in Independence: a CDROM is usually far less expensive than downloading from the net for those people with expensive net access and these are usually poorer than those people who can download for free from university or from their work.

6. Translating

   Some parts of the installation refer to RedHat and we have the legal obligation to change these references. In addition they mention commercial features like privileged ftp sites we cannot provide. That means we have to fix those texts in order to avoid legal problems related to "lies in advertisements" and that means that if we cannot write in a language we will drop support for it. So if you want Indy support your national language then learn about xgettext and help us with tranlations. In addition we would also like people translating manuals for some application software we esteem important

7. Writing doc

   Including great software or having nice features in the distribution isn't that useful if people don't know about it in the first place. Documenting Indy is a task as important as any. If you are a good writer this is a task for you.

8. Testing

   Sometimes a program who looks great on its home site will fail miserably when used for real and we don't want to ship lemons. Sometimes a program is broken due to Indy's people making a substandard package or there is a part in the installtion proper we were unable to try. We really need people testing both our work and the sofware we include for us being able to improve Indy.

9. Distribution snooping

   Try other ditributions and write motivated analysis of them attracting attention towards those features you would like to have in Indy. It would be really nice to have a distribution making a synthesis of what is available in Linux world.

10. Guru work

    Having good examples of configurations for situations similar to the one the user is facing can do wonders for easying the configurataion tasks. Unfortunately for many programs those examples are either missing or unadequate. If you are an expert at system administration this can be job for you.

Things will not just happen...

...if people dont work on them. A small team will be unable to have Indy making significant progress. If you are tired of getting distributions who don't pay attention to your problems, if you want to help in making a distribution made for the people, if you think Linux is a good thing who should be available for everyone instead of a minority then