There are many ways to get involved with Apache Atlas:

•  reviewing design proposals & providing feedback

•  engaging with the community on general discussions

•  raising new feature requests with supporting use cases

•  fixing up minor defects in code, documentation

•  developing & improving documentation

•  designing and coding significant features

•  testing of the Atlas code (standalone, performance, integration)

You can of course just use Atlas, but the value of open source is surely the community engagement & contribution   the benefits include:

• The community already consists of many excited individuals with a variety of affiliations including to experts in big data, enterprise systems, and bringing domain expertise in areas such as banking
• Deep and complementary experience across industry, product, operations experience
• By working together  we can deliver better open, common components
• Contributors gain the ability to influence development priorities & direction
• Partnering can be very varied – discussions, design, coding, testing, documenting, 

Learn

A good starting point is the introduction to Open Metadata as this sets out what we are trying to achieve 

Discuss

The most important aspect of any Apache project is collaboration, so an essential starting point is to join the relevant Atlas mailing lists.

The "dev" list is where potential changes, design discussions & anything relating to building Apache Atlas can be found

This can be fairly technical so we also now have a "user" mailing list which is ideal for newbies to the project or those who want to avoid the technical details about Atlas's implementation and just focus on using Atlas to deliver business value

A popular way of reading the lists is now with another apache project Pony Mail - go to http://lists.apache.org to start, login via google or apache, and browse/contribute to the lists. There are also replicas of these lists available via gmane.org, but this is not supported by Apache, and the site itself has been in somewhat of a flux recently. If interested go to "news.nntp.org" in a newsreader such as Thunderbird and search for groups under "gmane.comp.apache.atlas" (the Ranger lists are there too)

Finally when interacting with the mailing list, note that the EZLM mailing list server doesn't support all mail formats. In particular it has a dislike to HTML only email, so try to send a plain text (text/plain) or at least in multipart. Generally gmail, outlook, lotus notes, Apple mail all seem fine, but IBM verse will fail and posts simply get ignored as they are not posted. 

We also have ongoing calls on a few topics – if you're interested please ask on the mailing list.

Do: Write, design, code, test

The Atlas JIRA is where issues are tracked. Anyone can open a new issue if they find a bug or hit a problem with Atlas, and this is also one way - in addition to the dev mailing list - of finding out what code changes are being proposed or going in. Any design discussions will probably be oriented around a specific JIRA and may link to locations on this wiki, include design docs etc. No permission is needed to open a JIRA account, but if you wish to assign an issue to yourself to work on, please ask in the dev list for contributor authority for your JIRA account.

The wiki mentioned above is also something anyone can contribute to - again, open a apache wiki account & ask on the mailing lists for authority to update Atlas pages.

The Atlas source code can be found at: https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/atlas.git.  More information is located here: Git Repository Links.  Patches can be contributed via the Atlas JIRA.