The OpenStack community for Nova is a very friendly group and there are places online to join in with the community. Feel free to ask questions. This document points you to some of the places where you can communicate with people.
Our community welcomes all people interested in open source cloud computing, and there are no formal membership requirements. The best way to join the community is to talk with others online or at a meetup and offer contributions through Launchpad, the wiki, or blogs. We welcome all types of contributions, from blueprint designs to documentation to testing to deployment scripts.
To contribute code, sign up for a Launchpad account and sign a contributor license agreement, available on the OpenStack Wiki. Once the CLA is signed you can contribute code through the Bazaar version control system which is related to your Launchpad account. See the Setting Up a Development Environment page to get started.
There is a very active chat channel at irc://freenode.net/#openstack. This is usually the best place to ask questions and find your way around. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat and it is a way to chat online in real time. You can also ask a question and come back to the log files to read the answer later. Logs for the #openstack IRC channel are stored at http://eavesdrop.openstack.org/irclogs/.
The wiki is a living source of knowledge. It is edited by the community, and has collections of links and other sources of information. Typically the pages are a good place to write drafts for specs or documentation, describe a blueprint, or collaborate with others.
Launchpad is a code hosting service that hosts the Nova source code. From Launchpad you can report bugs, ask questions, and register blueprints (feature requests).
The OpenStack blog includes a weekly newsletter that aggregates OpenStack news from around the internet, as well as providing inside information on upcoming events and posts from OpenStack contributors.
See also: Planet OpenStack, aggregating blogs about OpenStack from around the internet into a single feed. If you’d like to contribute to this blog aggregation with your blog posts, there are instructions for adding your blog.
Because all the cool kids do it: @openstack. Also follow the #openstack tag for relevant tweets.
The nova.openstack.org site is geared towards developer documentation, and the docs.openstack.org site is intended for cloud administrators who are standing up and running OpenStack Compute in production. You can contribute to the Docs Site by using bzr and Launchpad and contributing to the openstack-manuals project at http://launchpad.net/openstack-manuals.