Getting Help from the Quartz Community

One of the key aspects that is often used to judge the health of an open source project is its user community. Because participation is voluntary and no paychecks are issued, users must feel somewhat passionate about a project to put in their time. Thus it makes sense that if a project has an adequate user community, those users believe in the value of the project.

The user community for Quartz is rather active. As with many other open source projects, the majority of members simply anonymously view the lists and messages; fewer users post and answer questions. In the six months that Quartz has been recording user's posts, the user forum has received more than 1,500 messages on 500 different topics and an amazing 25,000 people having viewed threads. This doesn't even include the messages and views of the developer list. If you track these numbers over six months, you can actually see an increasing trend. In terms of the number of downloads, Quartz is downloaded an average of 2,000 to 3,000 per month. These numbers can go higher when a new version is released.

You can find the links to both the user and developer forum at http://forums.opensymphony.com, or you can get to it by going to the Quartz home page at www.opensymphony.com/quartz. You are encouraged to sign up for e-mail from the lists; when you feel comfortable, you can then join in and help the project in any way you can.