[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] fattire:
Okay non-devs-- listen up!

Let me add that if you want to learn, the best way you can do it is to learn to compile your own kernel and your own Android.

I have written a few tutorials on doing this for NC and TouchPad, and there are numerous other resources for learning this. Anyone can do it, and CM7 is a great place to start.

In fact for a solid month in January, I "banned" the posting of update.zips on the XDA NookColor forum. Thanks to the mods and the NC community, this request was honored. I did this solely to create an opportunity for those who wanted the latest binaries but had been putting off learning to build it themselves. The result was literally many hundreds (perhaps over a thousand) people building CyanogenMod from source for the first time.

Many of those people are now building nightlies and creating true mods of value (not just "I changed the font, give me a donation), and have even contributed code back to CM, which is benefiting everyone. All thanks to all these people who decided okay, why not, I'm going to try to learn by doing...

Messing with your own kernel as described above may be a great way to make yourself valuable and you'll gain ninja skills pretty quick. Think of it as a "treasure hunt" -- is there a GPIO that will switch on bluetooth for Nook Tablet? It may be out there, so someone self-organize and help find it!

The "winner" will get mad props, and you might think that's enough. But no, there are more winners-- everyone will benefit from sudden access to bluetooth. And even MORE win-- everyone who was on the "hunt" will have learned how to build their own kernel.

Inspired? Here's a post I made a few weeks back focused on building the kernel for the TouchPad (aka "tenderloin")... 99% of it will apply to the NT kernel as well-- you will need to know a few differences, such as...

1. which kernel source do you want to use? One of the 2.6.35 repos or the experimental 3.x source?

2. How do you pack the resulting kernel (you won't need a uImage, just a zImage works fine) into a boot.img that you can boot from...

3. How do you then flash or copy the kernel to emmc/sd for testing...

I'm in a bit of a rush now, but you might want to check out loglud's helpful instructions which will help you answer the above questions.

The answer to "how do I help" is always to take the initiative and pitch in. And if you don't know what you're doing, just try anyway and see what happens. If it leads to success, awesome. If not, no one needs to know :) You will have learned a ton trying. Doing this kind of thing isn't like clearing a mountaintop where anyone can stop by and be handed a shovel and get to work. More people involved in fact may even slow things down, as the new people have to have the whole backstory explained, which takes time (among other factors). In the time that someone could say "here, do this and this and this", that person could have done "this and this and this" themselves...

So if there's something you're itching to learn or help with, start scratching. If you have specific questions on a particular topic, ask away... but as much as "I'm a non-dev and I want to help with something" seems intuitively helpful and useful, it's not worth much to someone struggling with a complex development problem. To use another analogy, it's a little like tapping someone engaged and focused in a chess match and saying "hey, can I help with this? I don't really know how to play this game, but I feel like I could be useful, so put me to work!" The spirit is totally right, the intention is REALLY appreciated, but the truly helpful thing would be to start learning about chess, and maybe ask some questions, and then at some point come back and make a specific suggestion for a move that makes sense, or maybe show a move or two that you made in this situation that won the game...

So non-devs: Grab a VM-- install ubuntu, and start playing around! :) Build a kernel to start, and go from there.

Edit: One last thought-- the moment you boot a kernel that you built completely from scratch will be an event you don't soon forget. You will be a lion, a ninja. Like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, you will strut around beating your chest and proclaim to the world-- I HAVE BUILT AND RUN A KERNEL! And you'll type "uname -a" in the shell, and see that yes, this kernel is yours-- you've turned source into a living, breathing thing of beauty. And the world will never be the same. You'll be in the club. You'll have a bad-ass skill that will impress your friends and cow your enemies. So get started!

Edit #2: chrmhoffmann points out that there is potential risk of messing up hardware when firing up random GPIOs. If you go on this hunt, be sure to research/understand the risks of doing so.