I apologize to my Planet Fedora readers. I originally posted this on multiply's Linux group, but that is available to members only. I wanted to be able to share it with some others. To the folks on Planet Fedora, this is preaching to the choir. 
We all use free and open source software every day. but did it ever occur to you, as it has to me, that it might be nice to be be able to give something back? But that is for wizards and gurus, right? Wrong.
Producing open source software requires a lot of different skills. OK. I may be something of a geek, I don't really have the energy to be a code maintainer, but certainly I can write about things that matter to me. So I agreed to be a beat writer, someone who prepares the release notes for some small corner of Fedora that I care about.
 You can contribute too. You can be one of the small band of contributors who influences the entire Linux environment. All you have to do is hop over to http://join.fedoraproject.org and dig in. If you want to look before you leap, visit the Fedora channels on the IRC freenode.net, peruse the Fedora mailing lists, read through the Fedora wiki at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki. You can be a part of shaping the future, and making things better for the millions of Linux users who follow.
But is it only the "elite" who can contribute? No, of course not. The open source community is all about "community", and community means welcoming people with open arms.
What is Fedora?
You all know that Fedora is an open source Linux distro. But really, there are two Fedoras; the distro, and the community. Certainly they are intertwined, but they are very much distinct.
You see, Fedora is all about community. The foundations of Fedora are represented by the foundation clover:
 Fedora is about Freedom. Fedora is free and open source, yes, free as in beer, but more importantly free as in speech. All the components of Fedora are unencumbered by restrictive licensing agreements. You can use Fedora how you want, you can modify it how you want, you can share it with who you want. Most other distros allow certain components that have some licensing encumbrances into their distro. Not so Fedora. Of course with Freedom as a foundation, Fedora makes no attempt to prevent you from using proprietary software, in fact, in some cases Fedora helps you find useful software that is not truly free and open source. But Fedora itself remains committed to the purely FOSS ideal.
 Fedora is about Friends. The community is warm and welcoming to all. Not only are contributors welcome, but perhaps more importantly, their ideas are welcomed. The Fedora community understands that there is a diverse ecosystem of needs and solutions out there, and a solution that might not make sense to me may very well be a solution that is right for you.
The Fedora community provides opportunities to interact with these friends through practically all the electronic media, but also through actual in-person events around the world. These events provide a chance to work together, to learn together, and yes, to knock back a brew or two together.
That community spans the globe. Fedora is released in forty languages and counting. The contributors, and the leadership, of the Fedora project come from all over, and benefit from that tremendous diversity of perspectives.
And Fedora's Friends aren't limited to those who are formally part of the Fedora project. Fedora works with many of the upstream projects that provide the applications that make up Linux. Often Fedora contributors are members of some other projects, but even when they are not, discoveries made by Fedora are actively shared with the upstream project. Because Fedora releases frequently, Fedora is often the first place a package gets widespread use. This often exposes feature requests that are frequently satisfied by Fedora developers and pushed back upstream so that all distributions can benefit.
Fedora is about Features. Fedora attempts to be the most feature-rich distribution. With the need to welcome ideas from a huge variety of contributors, how could it be any other way? Yes, this leads to a lot of duplication. But that allows you to have the application you prefer, whether or not it happens to be the one someone else prefers.
 Finally, Fedora is First. First, because it is important to make available those Features that Friends want to see in Fedora. First because there is no point in delaying the availability of the incredible flow of Features from the open source community. First because that is one of the key things that differentiates Fedora from other distros. It also means that the feature you want can appear in Fedora with surprising speed.
So how is the distro different?
There are really two things that make Fedora different from some other distribution. The first, as we mentioned earlier, is that Fedora stays pure to its Free and Open Source Software roots. If it is part of Fedora, the license is the GPL or something very close to the GPL.
To some this can be a problem. It shows most blatantly in multimedia. Fedora will not ship proprietary codecs as part of the distribution. However, Fedora makes it easy to locate and install those codecs. They just cannot be a part of Fedora.
Secondly, to be First with Features, Fedora releases often. Fedora releases a new version every six months. Since it takes a lot of effort to maintain a distribution consisting of over 11,000 packages, the Fedora project only provides support for the current and the previous version. There are some other projects that offer some support for earlier versions of Fedora, but the Fedora project itself focuses on three versions; the current version, the previous version, and the next version. Right now Fedorans are hard at work on Fedora 11. As bugs are corrected and features added many are reflected in updates to the repositories for Fedora 9 and 10. But Fedora 8 has been left behind.
Certainly there are other characteristics of Fedora that some may find important. Fedora and its descendants are still the only distributions to fully implement SELinux, Fedora has a feature-rich installation system. Fedora has a killer artwork team. I would suggest that Fedora has the best documentation, but since I'm part of that team, perhaps I shouldn't say that!
But the main differentiators are this rigid adherence to Free and Open Source Software, and the very fast release cycle. You will often hear Fedorans saying "release early and release often".
But what can I do?
 Fedora is a huge community undertaking a huge effort. As such, it needs all kinds of skills. Obviously, if you are a developer, well, developers are always in demand. Then there are packagers. These are people who take the packages from upstream projects and assemble them into RPMs. There are testers. With over 11,000 packages, there is always a need for interested people to install packages that aren't  quite yet ready for Fedora and poke and prod at them to uncover any weaknesses. Then there are designers, artists, font designers, interface designers and the like. And of course, writers and translators. One less obvious need is for ambassadors -- people to spread the word about Fedora.
Even if your interest is pretty narrow, there are special interest groups; folks who work to see that the needs of some slice of the community are responded to. There are  SIGs for areas of interest like astronomy, amateur radio and robotics. There are SIGs for programming languages like Haskell and oCaml. There are SIGs around specific features like multiseat and stateless Linux, and SIGs around specialized capabilities of the OS like printing and live upgrade. If you are passionate about any specific area there is probably a SIG for it. If not, start one!
How can I get started
Fedora is very, very transparent. The more or less "permanent" document is the wiki (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki). Discussions are held online on the freenode.net IRC network on a large number of channels. Do a /LIST #Fedora on freenode to see the various IRC channels dedicated to Fedora. (There are a LOT of channels on freenode so creating the listing can take quite a while.) There are also many discussion on mailing lists. Many of these lists can be found at http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo, others at http://lists.fedoraunity.org/mailman/listinfo.
I would suggest grazing the wiki and the mailing lists to get a feel for how the project operates. The wiki in particular has links to the various subprojects and SIGs. Drop by the IRC channels that might be interesting to you. Beware, though. Some of the IRC channels can be quiet for a long while before becoming active over some issue or another. Others are so busy you can hardly get a word in edgewise.
Once you are ready to take the plunge, click on the image below and dive in. There are plenty of people to help. In fact, if you have posted to any of the mailing lists or jumped on IRC you will have already met some of those folks.
When Fedora 11 ships wouldn't you like to be able to say "That's my distro", and know that it isn't just the one you use, but the one you helped produce; the distro with your fingerprints on it?
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