Get Involved & Participation Guide
If you have visited this page, you are likely interested in participating in language preservation. Whether you are a native speaker, an open-source developer, a student, or a language enthusiast who does not speak Hmar, there are many ways you can contribute to these projects immediately without having to contact anyone or wait for administrative approval. Below is our general participation framework outlining how you can get started.
We Don't Know What We Are Doing
Truthfully, we don't know what we are doing either. You do not need to be a professional linguist, a published author, or a senior software engineer to contribute. None of us have all the answers, and nobody expects flawless contributions on day one. If you feel unsure or worry about making mistakes, do not be intimidated. We are figuring these tools out as we go, and every small effort helps us learn together.
But Please Read the Guidelines First
Before making submissions, contributors must read the specific contribution guidelines and familiarize themselves with the workflow tools on each project's portal. While we maintain a low-barrier open policy, it is essential that all submissions adhere to project standards so contributions can be integrated cleanly without creating additional cleanup work for our small team.
And If You Don't Speak Hmar
You can still contribute to language preservation. Open-source developers, software maintainers, and data scientists can contribute directly by building open web micro-apps, improving PDF rendering tools for digitized books, or building open REST APIs for dictionary lookup. You can also help test our Hugging Face dataset mirrors via load_dataset hmar-heritage, format raw text corpora for machine learning pipelines, or audit software localization files in standard i18n JSON, PO, and XLIFF formats for mobile and desktop applications.
Or If You Do Speak Hmar
You can contribute asynchronously across several live projects at your own pace. You can draft or edit lead-section articles on history, geography, and science on wikimedia incubator wp/hmr, review technical terminology, phonetics, and definitions on the hmar open lexicon, or share public domain books and songbooks for high-resolution PDF scanning via the hmar digital library.
You Can Always Reach Out to Us
Because the active contributor count for each project is currently low, team members may be focused on a completely different priority, such as overhead book scanning or backend dataset pipelines.
While reaching out is not required to begin contributing, please feel free to send questions or suggestions to our team at daiopch54@gmail.com or donalmuoloi@gmail.com whenever you need guidance.