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Help Improve Augur: Use The Alpha, Communicate & Share Share Share!

by Tony Sakich
The Augur team is going strong right now and I am extremely proud to work with this hardworking, intelligent and just all around brilliant team!
All 7 of us are helping to create something we all truly believe in, but we also want to remind the community that this is open-source software and we still encourage community assistance and participation. This participation isn't limited to our GitHub page, what we need now is help spreading the word about the Augur Alpha and helping us to identify and repair any bugs during this crucial time in development.
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For those who aren't developers (like myself), I wanted to go into some detail about why this phase in the process is so important and follow it up with a more detailed list of methods to contact the team. Developers, you may want to skip this blog post and check the archives for some of our great technical posts from Dr. Jack Peterson or Joey Krug!
Software releases have a life cycle and Alpha is the very first phase used to begin testing. The length of the period differs drastically depending on the software being released. All types of software share two common traits during both the Alpha & Beta testing periods, they are that the period itself is absolutely essential and the second is the more testers, the better.
What that means is that we need you, we need you to play around with our software and try everything you can on it. Try both the browser version at http://demo.augur.net and also try the client version which you can find the installation directions here. When using the software, if you notice a bug, error or any sort of problem whatsoever, just click on the "Feedback" tab at the bottom of the page and let us know what's going on. The Feedback form allows users to include their email address and a screenshot if they have a visual of the problem they are having.
Something that we hope people noticed about Augur is that we try very hard to be as honest, forthcoming and communicative as possible with the community. We do know that all of the marketing dollars and promotion mean nothing if the platform is unable to perform up to user expectations. The best way we know to make sure these expectations are met is to have the most comprehensive and thorough testing phase possible.
It's essential to us that we maintain this advantage and the best way to do that is to encourage our users to break the Alpha and report to us what's happening.
Wanted to share an awesome quote that one of my best friends loves to use, it's called Linus's Law:
"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"
Communicate With Augur:
Evangelizing the Augur Alpha isn't the only thing we want to encourage readers to do, we also want to encourage everyone to both follow and communicate with the Augur Team. Feedback of all sorts is vital to us, we want to ensure that our contact information is constantly provided to anyone who has interest.
As it's 2015, there are so many platforms to communicate on that we want to ensure that all are covered for user convenience. As the Director of Marketing, I have shared an extremely large number of links for personal channels of communication, I felt it was essential to share as many as possible but I will state that I personally prefer Twitter. Regarding the links that represent the project as a whole, we try to prioritize the monitoring of GitHub, Twitter and Slack (which is open to the public) as well as our recently launched Augur SubReddit. 
Press, Media & Speaking Engagement Inquiries:
Augur welcomes all press requests, we do not discriminate and will chat with a relevant niche blog or global media outlets. As the Director of Marketing, please send all correspondence of this type to my personal address here.
Preferred Augur Channels:
Augur Team Contacts:
Joey Krug - Lead Deveoper & Co-Founder: Twitter, GitHub & LinkedIn
Dr. Jack Peterson - Lead Developer & Co-Founder: Twitter, GitHub & LinkedIn
Jeremy Gardner - Director of Operations: Twitter & LinkedIn
Tony Sakich - Director of Marketing: Twitter, LinkedIn, FacebookTumblr, GitHubAngelList
Peronet Despeignes - SpecialOps: Twitter & LinkedIn
Scott Leonard - Senior Software Engineer: GitHub & LinkedIn
Chris Calderon - Senior Software Engineer: GitHub & LinkedIn
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