We're always looking for smart and hard-working people to help out. It's really rewarding, and it's also a lot of fun. And it's really easy to get involved. We'll take whatever time and effort you can give us, and we'll work with you to get you started.

The project consists of two main components: the ModeShape JCR implementation and the ModeShape Tools for Eclipse. These are separate codebases, although at the moment we're trying to keep them on the same release schedule and to use a single JIRA project for all the issues. The Tools are something new for us, so we'll be evolving it over the next few months.

Also, we're getting close to releasing ModeShape 3.0, which is a major rearchitecting of the JCR implementation to be way faster, far more scalable, and all around better. We're spending nearly all of our time finishing that up, but until that's out the door we will continue to fix issues in and release patches for 2.8.

Here are some steps we suggest:

1. Bookmark the project site, our forums/articles, our JIRA project, and the ModeShape organization on GitHub.
2. Join us on IRC, follow our blog, and follow us on Twitter (@ModeShape).
3. Read about and install the tools we use (see ModeShape Development Tools and ModeShape and Maven)
4. Set up your local development environment and try building ModeShape JCR locally (see ModeShape Development Workflow)
5. Check out the new documentation for ModeShape 3.0
6. Read some of the forum threads

Let us know when that's all working, and we'll help you find some easier JIRA issues.