Galaxy is an open source project. What makes an open source project work is the community that supports it. There are numerous ways for people to get involved with Galaxy.

Support

Mailing Lists

Galaxy has thousands of users around the world, all using Galaxy in different and often novel ways. When these users have a question or a topic to discuss, they post it to a Galaxy Mailing List (following Support guidelines), where the whole community can respond. You can contribute by posting your own questions, solutions, and experience.

IRC Channel

Galaxy also has an IRC channel you can participate in. This IRC channel is an informal online gathering place for the Galaxy community to post questions and help each other out. If you are unfamiliar with IRC, it is conducive to quick discussion, much like chat. It's not so good at archiving discussions and making them searchable at a later date.

Tool Definitions

There are thousands of useful bioinformatics tools in existence and the Galaxy Main server (and the Galaxy Team) cannot possibly support all of them. Only tools that are widely useful in many areas of biomedical research (and meet several other criteria) are available on Main.

The Galaxy Tool Shed is a means to make these other tools available for use within local and cloud-based Galaxy instances. Galaxy administrators and tool developers can create tool wrappers that define tools within Galaxy. These wrappers can then be uploaded to the Tool Shed where they can be downloaded and installed on a Galaxy instance.

If you are already writing tool wrappers, or if you want to make your tool available to the entire Galaxy ecosystem, please contribute a tool wrapper to the Tool Shed.

Sharing Galaxy Objects

You can help other users by sharing or publishing your Galaxy histories, workflows, and datasets with other Galaxy users. This allows others to examine your analysis in detail (histories), to reuse your analysis with their own input data (workflows), and to use your results in their own analysis (datasets).

You can go a step further and document your analysis using Galaxy Pages, online documents which are tightly integrated with your Galaxy objects, and provide a written explanation of your analysis.

Report, Comment On and Vote on Issues and Features Requests

Have an idea for a feature? Found a bug? You can submit these, see what others have submitted, and comment and vote on any thing on the Galaxy Issue Board.

Setup a Public Server

If and when you setup your own Galaxy instance, you can make it available to researchers outside your organization. A number of groups have done this, often making a different tool set from Main available. See Public Galaxy Servers.

Documentation

This wiki contains a large amount of documentation about using and administering Galaxy. You can help keep this wiki current and relevant by maintaining it and by addressing gaps in the current documentation. See Wiki Help for more on updating this wiki.

Code

Galaxy is an open source project. Anyone can contribute to the code.

You can also update the source code documentation, which is present as Sphinx / RST Python docstrings in the code.

Events

Galaxy has a presence at many Events throughout the year. This includes annual Galaxy meetings (2012, 2011, 2010); workshops, tutorials, and talks at meetings, conferences, and courses; and special events like the NBIC Galaxy Hackathon. See Events for a complete list and a link to Google Calendar.

Outreach

You can also help by spreading the word about Galaxy. There are numerous ways to do this.