From The Wimptators: Volunteer for WIMP Contribute Day!

WIMP has been running for almost 4 years. That’s about 1,460 days or 35,000+ hours. Come April 2015, we will have achieved this with no sign of slowing down. In these near 4 years, the Wimptators (Melissa, Joshua, Randy and myself) have been hard at work pushing the community forward to its limits (hint: we have yet to find those limits!).

From the start, WIMP has been a community driven organization. We have many ideas and aspirations; however, there is only so much time and energy the Wimptators can put in.Even though WIMP is run by the four of us, it relies on the community’s efforts and contributions to make it what it is.

A Time To Give Back

Now is your chance to get more involved. WIMP is represented by the LLC, but it is by all accounts an open source community that thrives off of volunteerism and contribution. Last November we ran the first Contribute Day, we opened the WIMPspace doors for the community to gather and help improve and push forward our infrastructure. At first it was focused on our new website redesign, but we quickly realized there are many other ways one can contribute to the organization.

What’s great is that you aren’t required to be there all day – although I know you can’t stand the thought of being separated from your WIMP family. We had a few Wimps join us throughout the day, with some sticking it out for the whole day. Remember that you are always welcome to drop by at any time in the day, whatever works best for your schedule.

We had Wimps working on press releases, marketing materials, and getting our new website redesign a step closer to completion (note: still a work in progress!). Melissa had already worked on a mockup earlier in the year and we had volunteers slicing the mockup and building the HTML and CSS. We then converted the HTML/CSS into a WordPress theme. Meanwhile, others were working on refining the information architecture and sitemap of the new site.

And there are even more ways you can contribute, besides what we accomplished on the first Contribute Day. There’s always room for help with SEO, editorial work, outlining future events/meetups, design and any other skills you possess. What we’re saying is: this is the time to give back! It can also be a great time to learn something new too! At the same time, it’s not a time to learn something completely new from scratch, but a great opportunity to further your skills and learn.

How Can I Volunteer?

Okay, so you’re pumped and now you want to know how you can join us on this magical journey? You’re in luck, because we plan to host a Contribute Day once every quarter, our next one will be January 17! All you have to do is RSVP to the meetup event and show up!

The only requirement is that you bring a laptop (or some type of mobile computer) and your boundless energy to contribute! If you plan to contribute with development, a GitHub account is required and basic knowledge of Git. If Git is still new to you, don’t sweat! I’ll be more than happy to teach you some basics to get you off the ground, or you might check out this awesome blog post (h/t Quinn Supplee). With all that said, you are also welcome to contribute to our GitHub repos by submitting pull requests! WAT.

I hope to see you at our upcoming Contribute Day! It’s a great time to give back to the community and help us push it to the limit!