The Maven Community
Maven, like any other opensource project, relies heavily on the efforts of the entire user community to be ever vigilant 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
If you find things which are not correct or could be explained in a better way or you simply miss things do not hesitate to contact the maven community via the users mailing list and tell us about it.
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 more than 1,7 TiB 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.freenode.net with your favorite IRC client or with web IRC chat.