Gulden: Ten ways how you can contribute to the project
Gulden is in many ways different to the obvious big players in the crypto scene. Rather than shouting at loudest the newest ‘innovations’ with no intention at all, or capabilities what so ever, to implement those, despite the billions of ‘donated’ dollars of investment money, Gulden is and has been walking a different path all along. Real development! Make it work first! And in such a way that anyone can use it. Maybe even without knowing what kind of revolutionary technology they are using. Cut the crap and make it simple. This is how you eventually will achieve mass adoption. But for Gulden this approach had, so far, one downside. Just a few people know about the project. Although, with 150’000 users it has more followers than thousands of copy-paste projects can only dream about. For real world adoption it’s still just a speck on the windscreen. Gulden is a community driven currency. A lot of people dedicate their spare time to help others with questions or set up meetings and share their experiences. It’s a lot of fun. But we also need to move forward. So I wanted to share the below request of Gulden’s lead developer Malcolm with you. If you want to contribute any other way, be free to do so. You can always join guldencom.slack, the official Slack chat channel of Gulden. This is also the place where you can talk directly to the development team.
Ten ways you can help Gulden right now without spending a cent
- Rate and review us on the play store (Android) and app stores (Apple). These stores are an important source of new users for us, and one of the largest factors that influences whether users install our apps or not. It is an inevitable part of the industry we are in that occasionally some user abuses these stores to call us a scam and if this is the first thing new users see it can be very costly for us. The more genuine reviews on the store the less these few negative reviews matter; so rate and review us; it doesn’t have to be 5 stars and it doesn’t have to be 100% positive keep it realistic and genuine — users like genuine reviews. Vote up reviews that you like and vote down reviews that you dislike.
- Follow us on twitter/facebook/reddit. These also are important sources of new users, and (right or wrong) are something which lots of rating sites (another influencer of user decisions) score us on. Better than just following us, actually post to/about us occasionallyand help create visibility and interest by doingso.
- Github is also social media. As strange as it is a lot of people look to the amount of github stars a project has when deciding whether to use a product or not. Github stars can also be an important factor in attracting new technical contributors to the project. As a project with a large userbase but only a small technical userbase our star count is currently very anemic so spare a moment to star us on github.
- Wikipedia. We have a wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulden_(digital_currency) Almost all of the content in the article was contributed by a single person, he has given up because he was outnumbered by 2 abusive Wikipedia editors who revert almost all the content he has worked so hard on. The developers are not allowed to contribute to wikipedia so our hands are tied — we cannot help. If many people contribute small amounts of text over time and try to stick to the rules as much as possible it will be hard for these 2 abusive editors to continue to do this: make it non-biased, don’t cite the gulden web pages directly but always media citations; word things like an encyclopedia and not an advert.
- Localisation. Gulden relies on our user base to provide localisation of the products, we have an easy to use translation portal for this http://translate.gulden.com/ — If you speak any language that isn’t English, even if you aren’t very good at it, then you can contribute. Don’t be worried about how good you are, other users can always improve it with a better translation when they find the time.
- Documentation. If you have some technical skills and a little bit of spare time then the documentation work never ends, find something on our github that is not documented or could be better documented and contribute a pull request.
- Testing. Though the devs try to be as thorough as possible; complex software can always use more testing, if you have some technical skills and a talent for testing then join the #testnet channel on our slack and hunt down software issues. File detailed bug reports and make it easier for the devs to make our software even better.
- Coding. Got some programming skills and a bit of spare time? The Gulden code base is open source. Though distributed software is horrendously complex and notoriously difficult to work on, don’t let this put you off. Not every part of the software is like this and often there are lots of little “todos” in easier parts of the software that are ideal for others to work on. Take a look at our issue tracker, find an issue that is marked as “help_wanted” or “beginner_difficulty” and have a go.
- Support our merchants. Gulden has a large and growing number of merchants and this is fantastic, ultimately the success of our project lies in real world adoption. However as fantastic as these merchants are the only way to keep them and to get even more merchants is if people actually support them. So make a conscious effort to go to Gulden merchants when possible and use Gulden at them — lets make it known to the world that adding Gulden as a payment option is a good way to attract more business. Okay technically this is spending a cent but its money that would have been spent elsewhere anyway 🙂
- Talk about Gulden. Let others know about Gulden, what you like about it, what developments you find exciting etc. Don’t be pushy or try to force them to buy Gulden — nobody likes that, but do let them know and then over time they can make up their own minds.