First of all, thank you for considering to contribute. Lessy is built by people, for people. If you don't know where to start, this document will help you. It is important to read it so you understand our philosophy and what kind of contributions are the most valuable for us. Every one in the community should embrace the vision of the project so we all move in the same direction.
Most of the time in free software communities, the only contribution people think of is development. For Lessy, we want more diverse profiles and so, ideas. Here is a list of contributions you can make:
- test Lessy, report bugs, make suggestions
- help on the user experience and interface (UX/UI), especially if you have professional skills (you can start by having a look to our design guide)
- help on marketing, build the external communication with us
- write articles, make conferences, organize events, invite other members to have a drink with you, spread the world and be an animator of the community
- make illustrations (for instance, we do not have any logo or mascot yet)
- translate Lessy… well, we cannot choose the language in the application yet but it's definitely something we want to support in the future
- improve documentation if you think something is wrong or our English is bad (it certainly is!)
- and finally, help on development!
Also, if you think you can be of any help but your competences don't match with these contributions, just tell us what you can do and we'll be happy to get you started.
All contributors are listed in our contributors file.
Always remember that contributing must be fun. You're not here to be harassed or suffer from pressure. It means others must be nice to you and above all it is reciprocal!
Rules are very basic: be respectful, considerate, welcome people, always be inclusive in your communication, etc.
You can learn more about these rules and how they are enforced in our code of conduct.
As a member of the community, you have some kind of responsabilities. For instance, if you are going to develop, you must keep in mind security and code quality aspects. If you want to suggest an idea, also have some legal and morale considerations (for instance, we cannot accept features that would leak users' data to other services without their consent). If you're gonna to talk about community members in a conference, make sure they all agree to be mentioned.
So you're convinced and you want to help? First, you should know that we are mainly using two tools to handle community discussions:
- Framateam where everyday discussions happen and general help
- GitHub tickets when discussions need to stay on the long term and they are generally more technical
Side note: if you want to contact a specific member for any reason, you may find how to contact her or him in the contributors file.
If you're not sure where to look first, or you experience some difficulties, feel free to ask, everyone has been a beginner first!
Open an issue on GitHub and please be as specific as possible:
- what was expected
- steps to reproduce
If you're hosted on lessy.io please include when problem happened and your username.
If you're self-hosted, please include:
- version of Lessy
- environment (Ruby version, OS, etc.)
- related logs
Open a ticket on GitHub and expose your idea by explaining the problem you're experiencing and how you aim to solve it. Note we might try to challenge you on pertinence of your idea and/or on UX aspect. Remember a new feature means more code and so more complexity in the software, that's the reason why we try to solve more problematic issues first. Those with Lessy's vision in mind will be considerate more carefully.
To start contributing to code, you might be interested by the "good first issue" label on GitHub. It lists all issues we identified as easy for new contributors.
Also, you should have a look to technical documentation to get started. It is not yet very complete but we hope it's sufficient to have a running environment.