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Help us to make Kune better.

Call for Developers
(See below for other profiles)

Kune is a somehow young initiative still in a beta state of development, with a small community of developers behind it. In the current stage, the most urgent need is to have more hands to improve the project, fix annoying bugs and add features that are missing.

Thus, we call for your help. We would like to ask the community of existing developers or users with some Java or HTML/CSS knowledge, the developers who would like to find a challenging project in the Free Software & Free Culture world, to join us. Join to make Kune a reality and give it a new push so Free Software ideas can spread outside of the software world.

All Kune code is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 license, encouraging the use of free/libre web services. All the technologies, libraries and tools used are 100% free/libre.

The main technologies being used in the development are:

• Java for the implementation of the collaborative workspace
• GWT framework for the automatic translation of the Java code into Javascript, resulting in a powerful cross-browser Ajax GUI application.
• Wave protocol for collaborative/simultaneous editing and decentralized federation.
• XMPP protocol for the design of the transversal chat communication and the handling of events (through the Emite library)

Moreover, additional projects were created for supporting the main project, such as:

• Emite: This library implements the XMPP communications protocol using the bosh technique with GWT. It also handles the XMPP Instant Messaging protocol with a modular architecture to support easy implementation of XEPs to build any other XMPP based services. It also includes the full-featured chat GUI that Kune integrates.

The Kune project is hosted in the forge of OurProject.org.

At first glance, one might be afraid of the size of the project (check Ohloh for a few stats). However, we have put a huge amount of effort into implementing it in a modular and structured way, using plenty of design patterns. Thanks to gin and guice, developing, keeping modularity and extending our web client by adding new functionalities is rather easy.

Other development-related tasks to help with

If you are interested in helping in the development but you do not have enough programming skills or you just don’t want to get involved in this part, there are other helpful and important tasks that need to be done:

» Testing

Kune tries to keep a high level of Quality Assurance, making sure that major bugs are not overlooked by developers. There is an intensive use of JUnit and Selenium, which turned out very helpful in this task. However, until we reach a broader community, this is a difficult task for just a few eyes. We really need a user base for the testing of the current features of Kune and its libraries, that would report the errors and bugs discovered.

For reporting bugs or for enhancements requests, please use the bugtracking of Kune, or the issue register of emite.

» Documentation

Although the objectives of modularity and structuring have been successfully reached, Kune lacks a high quality documentation: manuals, online help, tutorials, programming references, interface guidelines, and so on. Contributors of this part are encouraged to join the others in the development team.

Everybody can Help (not only software developers)

» Translation

Kune has an emphasis in the support for internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) within the Kune application. It provides an easy and transparent way to do translations of the project’s modules without messing with the code. Maybe you can help in the translation of Kune to other languages (or even improve our English).

A screenshot sample of the translator dialog:

» Graphic Design & Artistic content

If there is one thing that Kune is not very strong in, that is Art and Design. Although it does have a nice look, the project aims to provide different themes to complete the easy customizing environment. However, for the moment this has been considered a secondary concern. Any graphic designer that could help in this matter would be highly appreciated.

» Usability: Problems using and understanding Kune

This is, by far, the most important objective of Kune: usability. This project is focused on non-techies – the general public which has no deep web technical knowledge. If you find something that is complicated to understand or to use in Kune (or on this website), please, report it to us so we can take the appropriate measures. We are specially concerned with the difficulties that your grandma would have with it, so please, give her a go at trying! 🙂

» Spread the word

We strongly believe in the urgent need of Kune. We think that it could really change things “in the real world” (and not only virtually). We decided long ago not to begin spreading the word about it untill we had a prototype to show, refusing the ideas of talking about vaporware. However, nowadays we do have a prototype to show ( as you can see here) so the time has come to talk about the project, and talk loudly.

If you like the project, we ask you to spread the word about it. You can give us some feedback about it (advice, suggestions, criticisms…). But you can also talk about it with other people that could be interested, write a post in your blog, tweet about it, mention it in a forum/mailing list/delicious/social network… Maybe if you do not have time to contribute, others will… and this is crucial for us. Kune is getting prepared to jump into the cyberspace and it should do that with the help of the community.

» Donations

Even with no time or skills, you can still help us by providing some economic support. As a community-supported initiative, Kune cannot provide salaries to their contributors, and it has no enterprise support. Moreover, ourproject.org and Kune refused to receive money from advertising, as we believe free/libre initiatives must be free of ads as well (as Wikipedia does). This development is resulting highly costly in time and effort, so if you can, please donate to the Comunes nonprofit behind Kune.