The following are the basic guidelines for making a contribution to this project
- Find an open role that suits and review expectations: Open Roles
- Find a manageable first issue: GitHub Issue Tracker
- It's okay to skip this step if looking for mentorship
- Review the Contributor Agreement
- Message Paul (or current project maintainer) with what role and/or issue interested in and times to have a half-hour to an hour video chat: Contact Paul
- The project maintainer will get back with times that work. We video before placing official roles volunteer or not for the following reasons.
- We want our community to be a bit more personal than a mailing list.
- To establish trust
- To understand goals, special needs, or concerns
- We need to limit contributions to what the project maintainer can manage. Please don't be offended if we don't have a place for you. It might not be the right time or fit.
- We only take and keep volunteers that we will pay for when we can afford it.
- Contributions and issue submissions are prioritized for those that are accepted and remain part of our community. Therefore is important that even volunteers go through a process of official acceptance where they are placed on the contributors list. Our contributors list helps establish who's taking point on what and gives a directory of who can help.
- After talking with the project maintainer make your first pull request
- When accepted your name and role will be added to the contributors list
- Move the desired task to in-progress on relevant project board: Projects
- Make sure the pound sign (#) followed by the issue number is included in the Pull Request
- Other than that we're not getting too excited about putting programmatic things in commit messages yet like semantic versioning. Though we may do this in the future.
- Just make sure the commit message is descriptive of the change
- Feel free to word it in the form of a user story if that helps -.e.g. As a user, I would like to be able to X when Y happens
We do accept issue tickets from the general public. If they are simple enough and there is time issue reports from the general public might get put on a project board or run with. In general however issues that come from our community of Volunteers, Employees, Supporters, and Paid Users are prioritized. The first three will be clearly listed in the supporters or contributors rosters. Paid Users will eventually have a separate support channel that the Deabute company handles. This way the concerns of the company and the community are separated fairly.
Why not open it to all, or doesn't it seem exploitative?
Nothing is free as in resources. In that meaning of the word, the answer is no. It cost management time to run a team of volunteers. I've seen it and done it in a non-profit I've helped run in the past. People volunteer for individual reasons and those reasons don't have to be altruistic. A volunteer's expectations should be respected or naturally fulfilled for a community effort to be sustainable. People generally want to be part of something much bigger than themselves. It's a non-trivial type of effort to drive.
Within reason, our volunteers are free to speak their minds, choose what they think is important to work on, and decide if they will continue to contribute their efforts. Unlike an employee that is indebted to fulfill the responsibilities of their job. In this way, the community of volunteers is a free labor force. Not nesicarilly for the company, but I think it is important that the interest align. My hope is the community eventually has the autonomy to drive the support of niche use cases of the application that aren't nesicarilly served by the interest of where the business revenue or potential of business value is.
It's my belief that open source developers should be less taken advantage of than sometimes they are. Free as in freedom shouldn't have to mean financial destitution in any aspect of life. Certain freedoms get afforded with payment some might be considered natural. Regardless we are all destined to ultimately lose all of our freedoms. Freedoms are affordances we actively maintain or obtain. One might think people work for good money or little to no money. I think ultimately people work for freedoms despite the number attached to their compensation.
I don't care if people want a job or a say in the act of it happening. I just want to provide better ways for people to manage their time, communication, and relationships through a web application. In the grand scheme of things, it's a small step. I'm going to align myself with others that come to see the same possibilities in whatever way they see their gain.