[wip] Create BRIEF.md

BRIEF.md

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+# Font Bakery Product Requirements Document
+
+This document sets out the product's requirements and design principles, what designers call a "brief."
+
+## 1. Sanity Checking
+
+The primary purpose of the project is to accelerate the on-boarding of font families into the Google Fonts library. 
+
+The project achieves this by developing tools for use 'at the coalface,' that sanity-check TTF and related files needed to onboard a single family into Google Fonts.
+
+This set of command-line programs should reflect some [Unix Philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy):
+
+* Do one thing and do it well, 
+* that work together, and
+* that work in similar/uniform way.
+
+They are simple, on the level of shell scripting done with in Python in order to access font internals via fonttools, rather than a large object oriented application.
+
+They avoid crafting custom pure-Python solutions to side-problems and rely on commonly installed utilities, such as using [GNU wget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wget) to fetch files from the internet. 
+
+#### 1.1 checking TTFs individually
+
+In addition to our own checks, this will check the TTFs with other projects such as ots, nototools, Microsoft Font Validator, Apple Font Validator, FontForge, GlyphNanny, and others.
+
+    ~/fonts/ofl/family $ fontbakery-check-ttf.py *ttf
+
+#### 1.2 checking TTFs as a family
+
+#### 1.3 hot-fixing TTFs
+
+Many common issues can be hot-fixed using fontTools.
+
+    ~/fonts/ofl/family $ fontbakery-check-ttf.py *ttf --autofix
+    $ rm *ttf;
+    $ rename s/ttf.fix/ttf/g;
+
+#### 1.4 generating others required files
+
+    ~/fonts/tools $ ./add_font.py ../ofl/family;
+
+#### 1.5 checking everything is in sync and correct
+
+    ~/fonts/tools $ ./sanity_check.py ../ofl/family;
+
+#### 1.6 comparing new versions to the ones in production to avoid regressions
+
+    ~/fonts/ofl $ ttx -s family-old/*ttf family/*ttf;
+    $ meld family-old/ family/;
+    $ rm family-old/*ttx family/*ttx;
+
+#### 1.7 sanity-check the entire collection
+
+The ultimate aim is a single master check script that all families pass.
+
+    ~/fonts $ fontbakery-check.py .
+    $ 
+
+## 2. Font Building (with Continuous Integration)
+
+Last minute hotfixing of TTFs is ideally unnecessary, so to accelerate the on-boarding of updates made by upstream font developers, we also develop tools for checking source files.
+
+Some font project upstreams do not provide binaries, or only provide OTF binaries, so we develop tools to build fonts from sources.
+
+These source file build and checking tools supplement and feed the first set of tools, and can be used for Continuous Integration of font sources kept in a version control repository (such as Travis and Github.) 
+
+The ultimate aim is that all fonts in the Google Fonts catalog have source repositories in [github.com/googlefonts](https://github.com/googlefonts) that are under continuous version control, so new errors or regressions are prevented at source.
+
+## 3. Web Dashboard
+
+To reach the ultimate aims of the project, a dashboard that measures progress would be great.

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -2,6 +2,8 @@ The project is run on Github, in the [typical](http://producingoss.com) free sof
 We'd love to accept your patches and contributions to this project. 
 There is just one thing you need to do first.
 
+## Google CLA
+
 Contributions to Google projects, even unofficial ones like this, must be accompanied by a Contributor License Agreement. 
 This is not a copyright assignment, it simply gives Google permission to use and redistribute your contributions as part of the project.
 
@@ -13,3 +15,16 @@ If you work for a company that wants to allow you to contribute your work, then
 You generally only need to submit a CLA once, so if you've already submitted one for a different project, you probably don't need to do it again.
 
 After your contribution is included, you will be listed in CONTRIBUTORS.txt and/or AUTHORS.txt: CONTRIBUTORS is the official list of people who can contribute (and typically have contributed) code to this repository, while the AUTHORS file lists the copyright holders.
+
+## How to Contribute
+
+Our production vision and high level requirements are explained in the [BRIEF.md](BRIEF.md)
+
+We use Github's Issue Tracker to report and track bugs, map out future improvements, set priorities and assign people to them.
+
+We only assign an issue to someone when they are going to work on that issue soon.
+
+We tag all issues with a priority tag, P0 for "urgent" through P5 for "someday-maybe"
+
+If you find a bug or have an idea, please create a new issue and we'll be happy to work with you on it!
+