Atheme is developed by atheme.org, an open-source development collective. Anyone can participate in the Atheme development process, simply by using our bugtracking instance. Contributors with an acceptable skillset and broad vision for the project are given commit access.
Atheme was originally built ontop of the IRC handling core of Shrike, which is a legacy minimalist services package. The developers of Atheme decided that Shrike was a good basis to build a more full-featured services package from, based on their previous experience of contributing to Shrike. However, almost no code remains from Shrike, but some of the design concepts do.
Atheme development is guided by it's core developers. To get an idea of the developmental direction of the project, visit our IRC channel or browse the enhancements section of the bugtracking instance.
Install Git, then do git clone git://git.atheme.org/atheme for Atheme itself, and
git clone git://git.atheme.org/atheme-web for Atheme-Web.