Introducing the Technical Team and Contributing to the CKAN Code

This post follows up the recent post about the CKAN Association to give more information about the new Technical Team (aka official "committers") and also gives the latest information on how anyone can contribute to CKAN on the technical side of things.

How to Get Involved in Contributing

There are lots of way to contribute to the technical side of CKAN from filing bug reports to coding up new extensions or improving the core code. We've recently created a dedicated guide for folks interested in contributed to the core CKAN codebase, along with a new guide on how to extend CKAN with "extensions". Furthermore, contributing isn’t just about the “core” CKAN codebase - with CKAN’s rich API there are lots of things to build that never need to go near the core python codebase and allow you to use any language you want - PHP, Javascript, Ruby, Java etc. For example, everything from a phone app, a visualization dashboard and integrations with third-party services can be done over the API without touching a line of core code. (If you’re interested in these sorts of contributions the "ideas tracker" on github is the best place to find out what people are doing - or share your own ideas).

The Technical Team

Overseeing, coordinating and directing contributions, especially for the core is the responsibility of the Technical Team. The Technical team is made up of experienced CKAN developers who have contributed back to the main CKAN repositories. The Technical Team meet regularly (currently twice a week) to review pull requests and discuss technical matters. Technical Team membership is open to anyone and membership is granted based on a proven record of competence and contribution. The Technical Team current lead is Ian Ward who has been working on CKAN for data.gc.ca. More about the Technical Team can be found on the Technical Team home page.