Thank you for your interest in contributing to Gittip! 😃
We welcome contributions of all types: design, code, discussion, marketing, etc.
If you are opening a new issue or submitting a pull request, go for it! Don't be afraid that it's a dumb idea or a duplicate of another issue or an unwanted change or whatever, especially if this is your first time participating with us. We're glad to have you! :^)
If you feel like we're ignoring your issue or pull request then call me out (@whit537) on Twitter, or if you're not on Twitter then email or even call me (Chad Whitacre, +1-412-925-4220).
Twitter and IRC are the two main online hangouts for Team Gittip (besides GitHub). I'm @whit537 on Twitter, and we're in #gittip on Freenode for our chatroom (here's a web interface). Jump in and introduce yourself! :^)
We also exist in the real world at times. :^)
For typo fixes and other small changes, you can use the GitHub web interface to propose changes.
To contribute more substantial changes, the first step is to install Gittip locally, which is documented in the README. That file also documents our testing setup. Changes with tests are better than changes without.
Find us on Twitter or Freenode if you get stuck (see above).
Collaborators. We're pretty liberal about adding and removing collaborators. Generally if you give us one good pull request and show an interest in continuing to be part of the Gittip dev team we'll give you access. We always ask your permission before doing so. If you get bored of Gittip and drift away, that's fine. After a month or two we'll try double-checking with you before taking you off the list until Gittip becomes interesting again. :^)
Pull Requests. You'll have push permission on the repos you're working on, but you shouldn't use it until you're invited to do so. We give you that permission because it's bundled with other permissions that we do want you to have, such as assigning tickets to yourself and labelling tickets. Please use pull requests to submit your work for code review. Please keep your pull requests fairly small, and please rebase your work onto the end of master before submitting it.
Assignments. Everyone is responsible for their own ticket assignments, as a way to be sure each of us owns the work we're doing. You should never have someone else assign a ticket to you or unassign a ticket from you. If someone else wants to take over a ticket from you they have to talk to you first and wait for you to unassign yourself before it's theirs.
License. Gittip is licensed under CC0, i.e., it's public domain.