Communication/Contact

=Communication=

Blender is a community project. It relies on its users to support each other, spread news, and continuously improve Blender.

With millions of downloads, Blender has relatively few contributors. It is essential that information flows in both directions between users and developers in a useful manner.

Copyright and Guidelines
Blender is an open source project, but developers and contributors need to take copyrights of proprietary software into account. Please read the Copyright Rules carefully before you start concepting a contribution to Blender / submit a proposal to any of the Blender communication platforms.

General guidelines for communication have been outlined in our Code of Conduct.

Mailing Lists
The main development discussion mailing list is:


 * bf-committers@blender.org.

If none of the lists below seem to fit your question, this is the one you want to mail. You can find information on how to subscribe and browse the archives through the bf-committers list info page.

For reading only:
 * bf-blender-cvs: All Blender source commit logs
 * bf-extensions-cvs: Python Add-ons commit log

Documentation, Translation and Education:
 * bf-docboard: About this wiki and the blender.org manual project
 * bf-translations-dev: Blender UI translations

Forum
Blender developer Discourse: similar to mailing lists, but in modern forum format. For discussion about Blender development.

Chat
Most developers are active on the #blender-coders channel on blender.chat.

See here for a full overview of popular chat channels.

Decisions and Planning
Blender's code is organized in modules; libraries or directories with files sharing a certain functionality. For each module, the module owners are responsible for maintenance and bug fixes. They also define - together with their team - roadmaps or todos for the module, aligned with the overall release cycles and roadmaps.

Weekly Developer Meetings
The Blender developer community has meetings every Monday in #blender-coders on blender.chat, with an alternating schedule to allow developers from both America and Australia/Asia to attend. The topic in the channel has the date of the next meeting.

The schedule switches every other week between:
 * 11:00 Central European Summer Time / 02:00 Los Angeles time / 9:00 UTC
 * 18:00 Central European Summer Time / 09:00 Los Angeles time / 16:00 UTC

Meeting reports are sent to devtalk and bf-committers. Most of the time, the agenda is decided at the start of the meeting, so if you have something that needs to be discussed, be there in time.

Note that the times change for UTC time during winter, when the times are 11:00 CET and 18:00 CET (note contrast with CEST). This means 10:00 UTC and 17:00 UTC during winter. -->

Weekly Development Updates
Every Monday an update report is published to devtalk and bf-committers. This is the one document to direct anyone interested on finding about what is happening in Blender.

This report is compiled by multiple hands:
 * Announcements: Everyone.
 * Modules and Projects: Modules and project members.
 * New Features and Changes: (Hans Goudey).
 * The list of commits is organized manually, but cleanup and fix commits are filtered out automatically with this script: `git log --no-merges --since 7.days.ago --pretty=format:"%h%x09%ar%x09%s ([commit](https://developer.blender.org/rB%h)) (_%an_)" | grep -v "Fix " | grep -v "Cleanup:"`
 * Welcomes, final edit and publishing: Developer Community Coordinator (Thomas Dinges).

Modules Meetings
Most modules have regular meetings. Their announcements and final notes are in devtalk.

User Feedback and Requests
Blender has magnitudes of more users than people who are involved with making it. That makes handling user feedback and feature requests - or even tracking them sanely - nearly impossible.

Instead we try to organize ourselves in ways that development and users can cooperate closely. For each module in Blender, there's a small and competent team working on it - including users helping out. You can find this information listed above. Feel welcome to use our channels and get involved with making Blender better.

As alternatives we like to mention:


 * Add ideas on the community-run Right-Click Select website
 * User feedback forum for feedback on ongoing development
 * Make sure your proposal is documented and published in public. Post this on the appropriate public lists, or on public forums (such as Blenderartists.org). It doesn't really matter where, a lot of users out there probably can tell you whether it's already there, already planned, a great new idea, or simply not possible.