Open Development Template

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.

Goals

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)

Why?

Source of Truth

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

Framework for Change

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.

Components

• 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.

Contributing

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