With every release, we're getting more and more support from the community. It definitely makes us happy and proud to see the adoption of CiviCRM growing. With 3.0 release, we would like to both encourage even more participation and say thank you to most active community contributors. Therefore, we're announcing Top Bug Hunter/Huntress Challenge in 3.0 release cycle!

What do you need to do to participate? It's quite simple - just help us test CiviCRM 3.0 while it's in alpha and beta stage. You can do it in following ways:

• Log in to CiviCRM 3.0 public sandbox and try out your favourite features. If you find a problem, please report it on the appropriate board of our forum. Please remember to include clear description of the problem, steps to reproduce it, potentially error message or traceback information. Remember that sandbox data is periodically reset.
• Download the tarball and upgrade a copy of your site to 3.0 - let us know if you encounter any problems. This is an especially valuable contribution since we need to have the upgrade process tested on different sets of data. After you've done this, play around with your favourite features, with your local data. Problems appearing? Use the CiviCRM 3.0 alpha testing board on the forums to discuss problems and find answers!
• Go through the CiviCRM 3.0 Documentation, help us improve it and make it relevant to upcoming version before we reach beta state (estimated 3 weeks). It's a wiki, so after creating an account, you can fix problems and add missing information.
• If you're a developer and have PHP skills, you can submit a patch through our issue tracker. Just create an issue, attaching a patch file that fixes a problem you've discovered in the CiviCRM 3.0 codebase.

We will be monitoring activity on the forum and in issues tracker over next few weeks. After we release CiviCRM 3.0 stable (which is planned to happen in around 4-6 weeks), core team members will evaluate community members activities and pick the most active person. The winner will be awarded with iPod touch 8 GB, with special dedication engraved on it. Another 4 most active people will win special CiviCRM t-shirts. Please take into consideration, that these t-shirts will be the first ones produced by the project and will definitely become a priceless collectible one day, when CiviCRM is The Open Source Solution for Non-profit Sector (even more than it's now). ;-)

So - test away, see you on forums and in issue tracker! :-)