How To Contribute
Welcome
Welcome to the OSPO Glossary contributing guide, and thank you for your interest. There are a number of ways you can contribute to this project, which we’ll cover in detail here:
OSPO glossary overview
The goal of this glossary is to simplify the Open Source Program Office space and thus make it more accessible to people.
The OSPO Glossary content is stored in this GitHub repo where you’ll find a list of issues and pull requests (PRs).
Who can contribute?
How you can participate in this project depends on your level of Open Source Program Office / Open Source within organizations expertise. Simplifying complex concepts requires a deep knowledge of the topic. Therefore, to contribute new terms, you must be proficient in them.
That know-how is required because explaining complex concepts in simple words is really hard. And while the digestible, user-friendly outcome may seem easy, achieving the desired simplicity results from hard work and collaboration between cloud native experts.
If you have never directly engaging with Open Source Program Offices or open source initiatives wihtin organizations yet, but still want to contribute, we recommend teaming up with someone who is. Once the expert is confident that the term accurately describes the concept, you are ready for your first Glossary contribution.
The localization effort is where beginners proficient in another language can make valuable contributions to the Glossary. With solid existing definitions in English, less experienced contributors can localize terms to a target language. You can join an existing localization team or create a new one. Read this guide’s Help Localize the glossary section to learn how to get started.
Before you start
Before beginning your Glossary contributor journey, be sure to complete the following steps:
- Create a GitHub account, if you don’t have one already.
- Be familiar with the DCO signature when making contributions.
Best practices
To facilitate the reviewing process, please use semantic line breaks (e.g., one line per sentence). We recommend checking out this markdown cheat sheet to correctly format Markdown text in GitHub (e.g., hyperlink, bold, italic). And when naming .md files, please use lowercase letters and hyphens instead of spaces to separate words and avoid parenthesis.
Style guide
Read our Style Guide to understand our guidelines for formatting and writing documents and make the contribution process more efficient.
Work on an existing issue
Go to the Glossary GitHub repo issues to find a list of available issues. You can use labels (e.g., English language, help needed, good first issue) to filter out issues.
Note: you can start working on an issue after the maintainers assigned it to you. You can only claim one term at a time. Workig on multiple terms is sequential, you must complete a term before claiming the next one.
Propose new terms
You can propose a new term for others to work on or create a new definition yourself. Either way, you’ll start by creating an issue.
We updated this guide based on templates from The Good Docs Project.