NOTA BENE - WORK IN PROGRESS - Your Inputs & Thoughts
This page gives specific ideas where to start if you want to help and develop the CAcert community.
There are three wiki pages about this topic:
HelpingCAcert - overview with general information about helping CAcert, focusing on tasks which can be tackled.
Help Needed - The page you are currently reading, which focuses on teams.
Jobs - descriptions of volunteer jobs at CAcert
Contents
Overview of Teams
If you consider to join a team - here is a list:
- Teams in Audit and Assurance
- Regular Assurance: There isn't a team - get enough points and encourage people to become assurer in bad-developed areas!
Board of CAcert Inc. can help to get in contact, if unsure who is the right person.
Teams marked with 
qualify less for starting, because usually require sophisticated skills and/or training or prerequisites.
Please note that "joining a team" is no formal act as such. You just start to communicate in the channels used by the team, usually a mailinglist and/or IRC channel. Teams are also not mutually exclusive. There's no commitment or minimum contribution or something like that. You're welcome just skimming the communication. Maybe one day there'll be the question where you are the best available person to answer!
Arbitration
Arbitration is the internal dispute resolution process of CAcert. Since one requirement on these jobs is having a kind of overview over the many areas of CAcert, this is not the ideal place for newcomers.
But, especially if you have some experience in dispute resolution in other areas (like being a referee in a sports club) or have some education/experience in law and/or litigations, you may also be able to provide valuable hints and support in this area.
For more details see the Arbitration Forum.
Infrastructure
The Infrastructure team cares for the servers of CAcert in the "non critical area", i.e. everything but the main webserver and signer machines. So all the supporting servers like this WiKi, the Git server, mailserver and much more is the playground here.
If you have some experience in system management, especially on Linux machines, you will probably be greeted most warmly by this team. But also if you are prepared to invest some work in learning in this area you may be welcome in the team too.
The Infrastructure page should provide more details for the curious.
Critical
The critical team does much the same work as #Infrastructure above, and therefor has similar requirements on your experience, but it concentrates on the main web- and database server and the signer machine.
As the name implies this is a very critical area for CAcert, and therefor not ideally suited for newcomers and learners. Critical admins also have to be "background checked", i.e. they have to be interviewed about their professional knowledge and career. Ideally this should identify potential conflicts of interest for the applicant, and may lead to a (usually temporary) denial of the "fitness for the job".
If you are nevertheless curious, the Critical Team page could be a starting point to learn more.
Education
One of the central goals of CAcert is the education of its Assurers, users and, to a less extent, the general public about CAcert itself, communication security, encryption and specifically the usage of digital certificates. The Education Team is the bunch of people who tries to advance this area.
Talents which are especially welcome in this team include experience in education (adults as well as school level), authoring for documentation and learning materials and related knowledge. Also people interested in organising Assurer Training Events are appreceated here as well as in the #Events team.
The team page of Education may be useful for you if this did raise your interest.
Events
CAcert is regularily present on fairs, exhibitions and congress events, like the FrOSCon or FOSDEM. The Events team bundles the knowledge, contacts, personnel and materials necessary to run a booth on such an event. Also, Assurer Training Events have to be organised in close collaboration with the #Education team.
You are our high potential if you have fun in "selling" CAcert during such events, as well as if you know how to organise locations or talk with event organisers so they offer stands (preferably for free, or at least low cost) for CAcert.
The Events page goes into more details here.
Policy
Policy group is quite different from other teams, as it concentrates more on internal rules and requirements. Those with a sharp tongue may say that this is the area which takes care that the other teams do not run out of work.
But, nevertheless, this is also an important area, more like a kind of parliament deciding on the basic directions and rules of CAcert. Usually participation at the policy group is not a full time job, unless you want to take over the job of Policy Officer. Newcomers are also welcome at the policy group, since ideally this should be a broad representation of the whole community.
The Policy group is manifested as a mailing list, the Policy page gives some more details.
Public Relations
Like most associations, CAcert also lives to a great part from its public perception. This is what the PR team is working on, issuing press releases, trying to launch articles about CAcert in technical press and generally caring about CAcert's appearence to the public. Of course there is a close collaboration with the #Events team.
This is an area which has been somewhat neglected recently, so it especially needs you if you know how to contact and raise the curiosity of magazine authors, bloggers or YouTubers, create interesting press releases or otherwise make CAcert known in the technical and general public.
One word of warning though, CAcert currently is mostly a bunch of techies. So you may have a hard time if you want to go into harcode corporate identity design...
For more, see the Public Relations page.
Software
Talking of techies, natually the people creating the code for all the web pages and databases spring to everyone's mind. These are the people flocking to the Software team.
You are a prime candidate for the software team if you know how to spell PHP or other techniques for web programming. A bit of knowledge in version management (GIT) or structured programming is a real bonus. Also very looked after are people who can do systematic tests, reproduce error reports and pin down user problems or do software code reviews. Another area is software architecture and development strategy.
Participation at the software team does not need to be a life long, full time commitment. Reproducing a tricky error, testing a particular bug which you want to have fixed or proposing a fix for a bug found in the https://bugs.cacert.org are also welcome if they are just a "one time donation".
Have a look at the Software Development if this strikes a chord with you.
Support
Sadly enough, lots of people run into problems when using CAcert. This is where the Support team comes into play. Support team can make many people happy (at last, kind of... 
) with a simple hint on what menu to use or which WiKi page to check for a specific solution. But of course some problems are more tricky, then Support contains the people who know whom to forward the request.
If you have the knack to finding out from the mails what people really wanted to do or say, or you find it rewarding to help other people over the many everyday little problems when using CAcert, this is a job for you. And you know that answering the same question the third time in one day may be as helpful for the user as it may be enervating to you.
The Support Team's page contains more information about this area.
Items and Areas
Support
- Triage of incoming support requests
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