Some of our readers have asked us what are the qualifications required to work with mumineen.org . Do you have to be Ph.D in Computer Science to understand the server infrastructure or be a full-time professional in Web design to do layout and content.

The answer is neither. mumineen.org volunteers come from varied backgrounds. Our earliest graphics work and page layout was done by someone going to medical school (cutting and slicing cadavers in the morning and slicing and dicing page-layouts/photographs at night). Our resident layout maestro who has a knack of determing browser bugs via impressive test-case reduction is an economics graduate. There are the usual suspects who have some paperwork by which they claim to know Computer Science but they are very much a minority.

What matters most is that there is something which scratches your itch and you feel motivated to pursue it whether its showing your l33t server skiils or your design/layout skills, maybe your writing skills. We try to use toolchains which are easily accessible to others without paying for license fees so its easy to recreate a similar environment at home or work. Since we use a lot of open source software we try to encourage our volunteers to work with the open source community by filing bugs, communicating with developers over IRC .

If you are new to world of open source software, you’ll find that filing bugs is a relatively easy and very satisfying (both from users as well developers) perspective to gain a better understanding of this world. Many people discount bug-filing saying that it’s pointless and the developers will figure it out at some time but alas very few if any OSS developers are friends with Dionne Warwick .

One of the major tools used for filing and tracking bugs is Bugzilla which is used by products such as Firefox and many others

As Yoda says

If, in bugzilla, your bug is not. Then young Jedi, a bug it is not! Hrrmm..”

So what are you waiting, get your bugzilla account and file those bugs right away

What we’ve observed that persons who have a tinkering bent of mind and are capable of self directed learning integrate into mumineen.org the easiest. Basically one should have a Macgyver personality

On that note, a plea to our American friends
Macgyver for President