While i'm new to OS contributing, I've found dealing with communities (especially in IRC) in a way that discourages vampires (http://www.slash7.com/pages/vampir

While i'm new to OS contributing, I've found dealing with communities (especially in IRC) in a way that discourages vampires (http://www.slash7.com/pages/vampires http://www.slash7.com/pages/vampires) and promotes friendly urges to "learn more" are generally appreciated if handled diplomatically. I'm attempting to get more involved in the CakePHP community myself and am taking the tact of contributing to smaller supporting projects (their documentation) and lurking in the IRC chat to understand other people's problems, learn from them and get to know the core developers. Edit: And never have the expectation that you'll ever get to work on core development. (Not that you can't, but this mantra will help to keep your motivations altruistic.)