Guidelines on how this open source community works. Read below to see how you can join an existing project or create your own.
One rule of this community:
We don't care if you break things. This is a playground and we encourage failing often. Use this as a practice ground and enjoy contributing to projects you create with your fellow students. Many students have gained real world experience "working in teams" by working on these projects
4 Step guide to get started:
1. Read the wonderful gitStarted Guide by our fellow student @wanraitelli
2. Make your first Pull Request (Free how-to tutorial at http://makeapullrequest.com/, and then check out Andrei's videos on github), by adding your name to the CONTRIBUTORS.md file in the start-here-guidelines project. (You can also use this walkthrough as a reference)
3. Go join a project and start contributing or create your own group project. Don't be shy and enjoy creating things together! Check out this guide for more information on selecting a project.
4. In order to see the Zero to Mastery Icon in your Github profile, follow these steps
Anatomy of an open source project
Every open source community is different.
Spending years on one open source project means you’ve gotten to know one open source project. Move to a different project, and you might find the vocabulary, norms, and communication styles are completely different.
That said, many open source projects follow a similar organizational structure. Understanding the different community roles and overall process will help you get quickly oriented to any new project.
A typical open source project has the following types of people:
Author: The person/s or organization that created the project
Owner: The person/s who has administrative ownership over the organization or repository (not always the same as the original author)
Maintainers: Contributors who are responsible for driving the vision and managing the organizational aspects of the project. (They may also be authors or owners of the project.)
Contributors: Everyone who has contributed something back to the project.
Community Members: People who use the project. They might be active in conversations or express their opinion on the project’s direction.
Bigger projects may also have subcommittees or working groups focused on different tasks, such as tooling, triage, community moderation, and event organizing. Look on a project’s website for a “team” page, or in the repository for governance documentation, to find this information.
A project also has documentation. These files are usually listed in the top level of a repository.
LICENSE: By definition, every open source project must have an open source license. If the project does not have a license, it is not open source.
README: The README is the instruction manual that welcomes new community members to the project. It explains why the project is useful and how to get started.
CONTRIBUTING: Whereas READMEs help people use the project, contributing docs help people contribute to the project. It explains what types of contributions are needed and how the process works. While not every project has a CONTRIBUTING file, its presence signals that this is a welcoming project to contribute to.
CODE_OF_CONDUCT: The code of conduct sets ground rules for participants’ behavior associated and helps to facilitate a friendly, welcoming environment. While not every project has a CODE_OF_CONDUCT file, its presence signals that this is a welcoming project to contribute to.
Other documentation: There might be additional documentation, such as tutorials, walkthroughs, or governance policies, especially on bigger projects.
Finally, open source projects use the following tools to organize discussion. Reading through the archives will give you a good picture of how the community thinks and works.
Issue tracker: Where people discuss issues related to the project.
Pull requests: Where people discuss and review changes that are in progress.
Discussion forums or mailing lists: Some projects may use these channels for conversational topics (for example, “How do I…“ or “What do you think about…“ instead of bug reports or feature requests). Others use the issue tracker for all conversations.
Synchronous chat channel: Some projects use chat channels (such as Discord or IRC) for casual conversation, collaboration, and quick exchanges.