Overview — Open Babel v2.3.0 documentation

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# Overview

Open Babel is developed using open, community-oriented development made possible by an active community – developers, testers, writers, implementers and most of all users. No matter which ‘er’ you happen to be, or how much time you can provide, you can make valuable contributions.

Not sure where to start? This section aims to give you some ideas.

## Provide input

You can help us by:

- helping to answer questions on our mailing list
- suggesting new features
- suggesting needed file formats
- reporting bugs

## Spread the word

If you find Open Babel useful, there’s a chance that others will also. You can help us by:

- promoting and citing Open Babel in talks and publications
- writing blog posts about Open Babel
- helping with documentation and our website
- building your own software on Open Babel

To get started, just send an email to our mailing list.

## Code a storm

As an open source project, Open Babel has a very open development process. This means that many contributors have helped with the project with a variety of help – some for long periods of time, and some with small, single changes. All types of assistance has been valuable to the growth of the project over the years.

New developers are always very welcome to OpenBabel so if you’re interested, just send an email to the developer list (join here) about what you would like to work on, or else we can come up with some ideas for areas where you could contribute. Here are some possibilites:

- Implement the latest algorithms described in the literature
- Add a new file format (see How to add a new file format)
- Perform ‘software archaeology’ (see Software Archaeology)
- Fix some bugs
- Add a requested feature
- Add support for additional datatypes
- Implement a feature from our roadmap

### Navigation

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