The Maven Community
Maven, like any other opensource project, relies heavily on the efforts of the entire user community to be ever vigilent for improvements, logging of defects, communicating use-cases, generating documentation, and being wary of other users in need. This is a quick guide outlining what members of the Maven community may do to make the system work better for everyone.
Helping With Maven
There is already a comprehensive Guide to Helping With Maven. That guide focuses upon beginning as a supporter, with information on how to help the coding effort.
Commit Questions or Answers to the Maven User FAQ
Documentation is currently a very high priority for the Maven community. Please help out where ever you can, specifically in the work-in-progress FAQ Wiki.
Help Log Defects in JIRA
Just as any other healthy project requires a quick turn-around on defects, and a transparent method of users to have their wishes heard, so too does Maven need your help. Refer to the Issue Tracking page.
Developers
For Maven developers, committers, PMC: there is a Developers Guide.
Being a Good Maven Citizen
The concept of a public repository built into the core architecture of Maven makes it necessarily community-centric. There are a few simple things that Maven users may do to help keep that community thriving.
Be a Kind Public Repository User
The best thing that a user can do is to set up their own remote repository mirror containing the projects needed: this is called a repository manager. This reduces strain on the Maven central repository, and allows new users to get acquainted with Maven easier and quicker. This is especially important for power-users and corporations. The incentive behind this is, controlling your own servers can give you desired level of security and more control over uptime, resulting in a better experience for your users. With that said, keep the following sentiment in mind:
DO NOT wget THE ENTIRE REPOSITORY!
Please take only the jars you need. We understand this is may entail more work, but grabbing all 9+ Gigs of binaries really kills our servers.
User Gathering Spots
These are a few of the watering holes around which Maven users tend to gather.
Mailing Lists
Maven has a number of Mailing Lists, and the Maven User List is specifically dedicated to answering questions about all Maven things.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
Log into the #maven IRC channel on irc.codehaus.org with your favorite IRC client or with web IRC client.