To get involved in any Jakarta EE project or initiative, start by creating an Eclipse Foundation account.
Once you have an account, you can choose any of the methods below to participate.
Join our communication channels to learn about the latest community initiatives and determine how you can get involved.
Select a Jakarta EE project of interest, join the project’s mailing list and start communicating with the team.
Before starting to contribute, you need to make sure your paperwork is in order. When contributing as an individual, login to your EF account and sign the Eclipse Contributor Agreement. You can then work with the project team to contribute your work. Visit the Eclipse Contributor Agreement page to learn more about the agreement. However, in the case your employer is already a member of the Jakarta EE Working Group, your employer has a Member Committer and Contributor Agreement in place that covers all their employees who are contributing, and you do not need to do anything!
Jakarta EE contributors are eligible to become committers. Becoming a committer can happen in a couple of ways: 1) For existing Jakarta EE projects, it happens through an election! After you have made contributions that demonstrate that you understand how the open source project works, a current committer on that project will initiate an election. Current committers must vote in the election; so creating a public record of high quality contributions that committers (and the community) can review is the most important part of this entire process. 2) Another option is to become a committer of a new Jakarta EE Specification project, by making initial contributions. The corresponding Project Management Committee (PMC) of the project nominates an initial set of committers for approval by the Executive Director (or his delegates).
If your employer is a member of the Jakarta EE Working Group, they’ve already signed the necessary paperwork and there is no paperwork for you to complete.
If your employer is not a member of the Jakarta EE Working Group, you will need to complete the following forms:
Any individual or organization with an interest in advancing Jakarta EE can join the Jakarta EE Working Group.
Review the Jakarta EE Working Group Charter, then 
contact us.
For more information, explore the Jakarta EE website.
Gain a better understanding of the technology, and have the opportunity to work with, and learn from, a team of experienced engineers and industry leaders
Be more visible and establish your reputation in the community
Contribute and work on your own time and from anywhere in the world
Influence the future of cloud native, open source Java, and build new relationships with leading players in the Java ecosystem. Help advance Jakarta EE technologies, along with the quality and relevance of the Jakarta EE specification, while enjoying the satisfaction of knowing you helped make it happen.
You absolutely don’t have to be the most brilliant, sophisticated, or advanced person in the world to be a committer, but you do need a lot of passion for the work and for the role. You must be willing to dedicate a lot of time to open source because you really like it and it’s your hobby. That passion will take you a long way. When you work with open source software, you have an advantage, and your customers have an even bigger advantage because you implemented the stack you’re working on and you know the other people involved.
- Arjan Tijms, Self-employed software consultant, author
The seriousness, competence, and hospitality in the Jakarta EE community cannot be matched in any other community. I believe I’m doing something important with some of the best programmers in the world. I think I can help make Jakarta EE better, and more importantly, I’m better at using Jakarta EE. This motivates me and makes me happy. The best thing about being a committer is seeing your work released, and the most challenging thing is finding areas where you can really make an improvement.
- Dmitri Cherkas, Be-Tse Group - Milan Office
I like the fact that you can contribute to projects, review other people's work, and help the community. Keeping the community growing is one of the important factors for the success of the project. I want to help MicroProfile and Jakarta EE be as successful as possible, encourage innovation, and encourage others to join these communities and collaborate because these open source communities are full of passionate people
- Emily Jiang, IBM
Getting involved in open source gives you experience, knowledge, and a really good feeling because you’re accomplishing something meaningful. Being a committer is a great opportunity to work on projects that are popular, widely used, and make life easier for project communities. Solving the community’s problems is very rewarding. I also enjoy the opportunity to solve a different issue every day because it allows me to have rich experiences in a variety of situations.
- Jan Supol, Oracle
I like the openness, the access to the code base, the expertise, and the people who are developing the software. It’s a great knowledge base. There are many ways to contribute, from answering questions on the various project mailing lists to filing issues or creating pull requests. You can influence a project by issuing a patch, having an expert review that patch, and having it committed to a project. The big advantage of being more involved is access to expertise.
- Jason Mehrens, Inpixon
Getting involved in an open source project is a very good way to solve problems you’re having because Eclipse open source is all about contributions and collaboration. If you have a project that’s not getting appropriate attention, the Eclipse and Jakarta EE community can help you move it forward.
You can start by doing small stuff. It may seem as though it’s not important, but it very often is. You can grow your knowledge about a project and the processes around it to gain experience and work toward committer status if that’s what you want.
- Lukas Jungmann, Oracle Corporation
The best thing about being a committer on an open source project in an environment such as Jakarta EE is that it’s very different from my daily work. At work, I rarely get feedback from the people who actually use my code, whereas here, I can communicate directly with people and respond to their needs. That's a lot of fun for me. Have the confidence to contribute something. You’ll find that the people working on most open source projects gladly accept every improvement.
- Tobias Erdle, INNOQ
