Documentation templates that help teams and projects formalize their mission, workflow (or process), licensing and governance to encourage participation, field contributions and help grow a community.

This project provides templates for project documentation that:

• makes it easy for newcomers to a project to get involved (creates an environment with a low barrier to entry)
• enables maintainability as a project grows (scales up)

Documentation makes things explicit and that is helpful for the mushy, social things templated in this project.

Formalizing the described aspects of a project allows for a mediated means of changing how these aspects work. That is, by formalizing a project's e.g. objectives, it gives project members a means for changing the project's objectives through a peer review (patch submission / pull request) system that most (software) projects are familiar with.

• Mission: What are the goals of the project?
• Governance: How are decisions made in the project? What are the human or social rules that should be followed in the project? What is the social framework for collaboration in the project?
• Licensing: How can I use the project? How can I contribute to the project? What is the legal framework for collaboration in the project?
• Process: How is work done in the project? How do we implement the project's Governance to give project contributors structure in how they do their work?

Each component describes why and how to document each aspect of a project and provides examples.

Thanks for thinking about contributing to this project! Check out our contribution guidelines for information on how to get involved.