Get involved (gardeners)

There are a number of ways that gardeners can get involved in Growstuff right now.

Tell us about yourself and how you grow stuff
We'd love to hear about you and your food gardening, to get an idea about the people who are interested in using our site. For now the best way to do this is to join our Mailing list and introduce yourself. You might like to tell us where you live, what sort of food you grow, how long you've been doing it, and what resources you use at present to help you (eg. your favourite websites, books, etc).

Suggest features you want
Is there something missing from other gardening websites you've tried? Or something you've seen on one website that you think should be a part of ours? Perhaps you've been thinking for years that if you just had that one thing it would make your life way easier.

The best way to suggest features, at present, is to join the Mailing list and post a message telling us your thoughts, or to join the IRC channel (anytime, but we especially recommend during our weekly "Gatherings", held each Sundays at different times) and chat to us there.

If a feature sounds like a good idea, and we haven't thought of it yet, we'll add it to Pivotal Tracker (where we track things we want to work on) and factor it into our development plans.

Try out our "work in progress"
We're currently working on building the site, and have a demo site available at http://dev.growstuff.org/ You are welcome to sign up for an account and take a look around.

Be sure to read the Terms of Service and understand that this is NOT a fully supported website at present. Things may change without notice and we don't promise not to accidentally mess stuff up. Still, it should give you an idea of what we're working on and where we're at.

If you do sign up for the development/demo site, we strongly recommend that you subscribe to our Mailing list to receive updates/news about what's happening. (Are we starting to sound like a broken record yet? Join the mailing list!)

If you'd like to do this more formally, every development Iteration we recruit a handful of gardeners/potential site members to test and review each piece of work we do, and approve or reject it. If you'd like to be part of that, see the Customer page on this wiki for more information.

Help us build our knowledge base
From time to time we need gardener assistance in gathering data for various purposes. For instance, early on, we had a shared spreadsheet for crops where we listed a couple of hundred different crops to get our crop database started. We asked gardeners to add things to this list, find scientific names and Wikipedia URLs for each crop, and so on.

Once again, the Mailing list is the place to see announcements when we're looking for help with this sort of thing, though we'll also often mention them on Twitter. You can follow us at @growstufforg.

Help us with market research
If you've told us about yourself and your own food gardening efforts, that's already an enormous help. But if you'd like to go further, there are a number of places where we could use your local knowledge or, if you have time, your online research skills. For instance, we're always interested to know about Similar projects and what they do similarly or differently from ours. We're also trying to build a list of venues for Promotion -- publications, blogs, community groups, etc, where we could try to tell people about Growstuff and encourage more gardeners to join.

To help us with these lists, request a wiki account then edit the pages in question to add what you know. There is editing help available for the wiki markup if you need it.

If you'd like to learn to code
You don't have to be a coder to participate in this project, but if you find yourself interested and would like to learn, we would be very happy to teach you! Take a look at our Newbie guide and talk to one of the coaches when the next call for developers is made on the Mailing list (or really, at any time).