Both Ruby and Rails are fortunate to have strong, collegial, and intensely involved communities. Many newcomers might like to become part of that community but don't know how they can or even why they should. Anyone seeing this talk should come away with what they need to get involved and contribute.

This talk starts with a discussion of motivations for contributing. Next it discusses the kinds of contributions that can be made (code, documentation, tests, etc.). The Rails Trac web site is described, along with instructions for creating new tickets, uploading patches, using keywords, searching, etc. A useful local development environment is shown. There is an overview of how to test contributed code and writing proper documentation. An example patch is shown. Care and feeding of a submitted patch is described. Finally, there is a discussion of how to participate in the community beyond just submitting a patch.