For Mibbit there's been a few ways people have helped:
1. Testing - people love finding bugs and telling you about them. You get some crazy fanatical users that can't wait to try your new release on 17 different browsers and email you with any issues.
2. Documentation - wiki. A great way to have people help each other, and to grow the project.
3. Helping other users - if it's applicable have a help chatroom where you hang out, in which new users can come. With Mibbit there's now a core group of users that hang out in the help channel helping new users.
4. Integration with other things - For mibbit, people have created joomla plugins, mediawiki extensions, and even submitted a bug report to firefox that Mibbit should be the default handler for irc://.
5. Adding to a feature wish list (I'd recommend using a wiki and seeing if someone is willing to maintain it and keep it tidy and organised). Although I know there is a good webapp for voting up/down feature requests (Forget the name though).
5. Obviously word of mouth/recommendation/blogging about it.
6. Internationalization - People seem all too willing to translate a UI into other languages.
For me personally at the moment, I'm not interested in people helping with the software for a variety of reasons, but the above ways people do help are excellent, as they all assist in growth - worth far more than them donating some $.
Of course I'm sure once things get larger the dynamics change, but for an early stage I'd recommend those sorts of things.
1. Testing - people love finding bugs and telling you about them. You get some crazy fanatical users that can't wait to try your new release on 17 different browsers and email you with any issues.
2. Documentation - wiki. A great way to have people help each other, and to grow the project.
3. Helping other users - if it's applicable have a help chatroom where you hang out, in which new users can come. With Mibbit there's now a core group of users that hang out in the help channel helping new users.
4. Integration with other things - For mibbit, people have created joomla plugins, mediawiki extensions, and even submitted a bug report to firefox that Mibbit should be the default handler for irc://.
5. Adding to a feature wish list (I'd recommend using a wiki and seeing if someone is willing to maintain it and keep it tidy and organised). Although I know there is a good webapp for voting up/down feature requests (Forget the name though).
5. Obviously word of mouth/recommendation/blogging about it.
6. Internationalization - People seem all too willing to translate a UI into other languages.
For me personally at the moment, I'm not interested in people helping with the software for a variety of reasons, but the above ways people do help are excellent, as they all assist in growth - worth far more than them donating some $.
Of course I'm sure once things get larger the dynamics change, but for an early stage I'd recommend those sorts of things.