Contributor Guidelines

[martindale]

Hello, Elements Project community!

I'm starting a conversation about how to best manage contributions to the ElementsProject.org website. What is the most appropriate flow for a community-managed, content-oriented resource on the web?

Considerations should include how we manage content updates, bug and issue reports, tasks and resourcing, and who is able to merge (and who is expected to merge) pull requests.

Seeking opinions and discussion.

[harding]

Finding active and quality contributors to a public website is hard, but I think we had modest success on Bitcoin.org through the simple expediency of,

1. We asked for help in the areas where the most help was needed or wanted. This targeted people who wanted to help but didn't know where to get started.
2. We made it easy for potential contributors to contact the website maintainers in private (e.g. through email rather than a public GitHub issue). This seemed to be especially useful for getting people involved who were new to Git or GitHub but who still wanted to make useful contributions.

I think you can see these two ideas at work in Bitcoin.org's GitHub readme

As for who should commit, I suggest following the old open source rules of giving longstanding, high-quality, and non-controversial contributors commit access and having every PR that isn't an emergency or trivial patch reviewed by at least one other respected contributor.