Contributing Guide

[jodeleeuw]

There's been a fair amount of healthy discussion about what a new contribution to this repo should look like. This makes me think that a contribution guide, beyond what's currently in the readme would be useful. Specifically, I think the guide should cover:

• The scope of the repository, i.e., what are we trying to accomplish here.
• What an ideal contribution looks like (and why!)
• What the range of acceptable contributions are, i.e., what will cause the maintainers to reject a pull request or request modifications
• How to structure the pull request
• What will happen to a contribution after it is made (other people may edit it).
• How one can get credit for a contribution (citing these tasks)
• And probably other things as well...

Creating this doc will also help the early contributors to this repo hash out some of these guiding principles and settle on a common understanding of what we are trying to do.

[pjkohler]

I am happy to contribute. Where would the guide live? I am thinking we would not want to have it on the front page, as it is already becoming quite dense. We might have separate subfolders devoted to contributing an experiment and collecting data using an experiment, that we link to from the front page.

[jodeleeuw]

I think a contributing.md file in the root directory is pretty standard practice for GitHub. Some GH docs.

We could also turn on GitHub pages for this repo and make a very small /docs directory that would be served as a website.

[pjkohler]

nice, okay. Why don't we start with a contributing.md file and then we can consider turning on Github pages later? I use Github pages for my lab website and am really happy with it, but not an expert by any means.

[jodeleeuw]

sounds good!

[pjkohler]

I have added some files and updated the Readme. Very far from @jodeleeuw's notion of scope and so on, but it is a start. I would like to know how a pull request should work. I am doing one with Jason shortly, but not if our procedure is 100% the one we want to follow.