About the Foundation for Public Code

Contribute as an individual

This guide

Contents

  1. How you can help
    1. Contribute to open issues
    2. Identify new issues
    3. Suggest changes to content in pull requests
    4. Contribute to our projects
  2. Become an advisor
  3. Work for the Foundation
  4. Responsible disclosure and contact information

The Foundation for Public Code has a mission to enable public-purpose software and policy that is open and collaborative. In order to fulfil our mission we – the directors of the Foundation, our advisors and contributors – need your help!

This repository serves as the ‘official source of truth’ about the Foundation for Public Code. It contains all of its documentation, procedures and information as well as explanations on what the Foundation for Public Code does. We see it as a living charter.

In this guide we try to set out all the ways you can contribute to the Foundation for Public Code.

How you can help

Outlined below are some ways you can help. Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. Please be lovely to all other community members! :heart: :rainbow:

Contribute to open issues

You can find a list of open issues on our backlog.

Issues are best solved by collaboration, so don’t worry if you don’t know all the answers! We’d love to get your comments, perspectives and encouragements 👍.

If you respond to an issue you will be notified by email of any new responses. You can reply to that email to reply in the thread. If you are interested in a certain discussion but do not want to post, use the ‘subscribe’ button.

Identify new issues

Let us know what’s important to you by creating an issue. This can be something that’s not clear, is missing and you’d like to see in the future, or something you found useful and could be expanded. This could be anything related to the Foundation for Public Code, including our organization, our documentation and/or our communications.

Resolving these issues is a community effort as well, so be sure to clearly describe what you mean as others might not have the same context that you have.

Here are some general tips for making a good issue:

  • Raise one point per issue (no X and Y issues)
  • No negations in the issue title
  • The issue title should be clear and understandable

If your issue is large and complex, our guide to writing issues may help you structure it.

Suggest changes to content in pull requests

Once you have identified the issue you would like to work on, feel free to suggest changes to the content in a pull request and reference the relevant issue.

If you are new to git and GitHub, check out our trainings. These will explain how to make good issues and pull requests, as well as use Markdown.

This repository is automatically converted into a website with Jekyll and GitHub pages, so make sure that every file you contribute is valid Markdown.

If you want to add new pages, please have a look at how we structure this repository.

To get your contributions merged, you should make your pull request towards the branch develop, as per the content governance guide.

If you want to, you can also build and preview the website locally before making a pull request.

Contribute to our projects

And of course we’d love input into our projects as well, like the Standard for Public Code.

Become an advisor

If you provide us with meaningful contributions we might ask you to become an advisor. Our advisors are a group of subject matter experts from different fields that help us progress the mission of the Foundation for Public Code and have a special position within the Foundation.

Work for the Foundation

We’re currently hiring codebase stewards to review codebase quality and build strong open source communities. If the prospect of building an ecosystem of public code thrills you, then we’d love to hear from you.

Responsible disclosure and contact information

If you see an issue that should be resolved in private like a security or liability issue, please contact directors@publiccode.net.

If you have any other questions, feel free to make a new issue for them or email the directors at directors@publiccode.net.