🛠⛏ Contributing Guidelines

Out of the multiple projects we're building, about 60% are built on public repositories on Github, released under OSI-approved licenses like the MIT License, the GNU General Public License and Apache License 2.0. This ensures that developers who have completed any of our courses can almost immediately start contributing by reviewing code, creating pull requests and making commits. Essentially turning contributors to maintainers and a community.

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our projects and our community a harassment-free experience for everyone.

By participating in this project (online and at live chapter events) you agree to abide by our community guidelines including:

• Code of Conduct
• Maintainers Best Practises
• Leadership & Governance Model

Want to get started contributing to some of your Factory24 projects, lets start by going through our How To Contribute guideline.

How To Contribute

By building on the Github Open Source Guides, in this write up we explore how to contribute to Factory24 by describing:

• What it means to contribute
• Finding a project to contribute to
• How to submit a contribution
• What happens after you submit a contribution

What It Means To Contribute

With the ultimate goal of being the platform and the source of disruptive innovations in Africa to develop and build solutions that overcomes current social-economic challenges, transform Africa's human capital in technology and leapfrog into the 5th industrial revolution - contributing to Factory24 project involves more than just writing code.

Together we can identify and nurture next-gen innovators, entrepreneurs & creative problem solvers from Africa by contributing through:

• Facilitating & Organizing a Factory24 chapter in your country - currently Factory24 is active in 8 of the 54 countries in Africa. You can help by expanding our presence by opening and facilitating Factory24 events in your country or city.

• Promoting Factory24 through Media - Do you like to write, speak, do you have an active social media presence, you curate newsletters, media posts, interviews and promotions of Factory24 in your locally or internationally.

• Offer to mentor developers and mentors - Mentor next generation of entrepreneurs of African start-ups with your expertise, experience and know-how and help them become market ready.

• Write code & maintain open sourced projects - Interested in IoT, Blockchain, and working on real world projects? Automate project setup, Improve tooling and testing or help write a new feature.

Finding A Project To Contribute To

Now that you know all the ways you can start contributing to Factory24, the best way to identify projects you can start contributing to is by starting with what you do best. Some of the resources you can use to determine where to start include:

• Open Issues & Pull Requests
• Project Documentation
• License Maintenance

How To Submit A Contribution

Once you've identified an area you can assist with, take note of the following before opening an issue or pull request:

• Give context on the issue to help other contributers and maintainers get up to speed quickly
• Ensure you have done proper research on the issue - most often, solutions are already addressed in a README, project document, or on other closed issues & PRs
• Only issues regarding systems or network security should be shared with maintainers privately
• Although we welcome all contributions, not all suggestions, ideas or requests can be intergrated - although this will vary from project to project, kindly respect community decisions and feedback to contributions.

It’s helpful to watch (on GitHub, you can click “Watch” to be notified of all conversations) the projects that you're interested in to familiarize with how contributions are made, received and resolved.

What Happens After You Submit A Contribution

Just as it's explained in the Github open source, one of the following will happen after you have submitted your contribution:

1. 😭 You don’t get a response - If you haven’t gotten a response in over a week, it’s fair to politely respond in that same thread, asking someone for a review. If you know the name of the right person to review your contribution, you can @-mention them in that thread. Don’t reach out to that person privately; remember that public communication is vital to open source projects.

2. 🚧 Someone requests changes to your contribution - It’s common that you’ll be asked to make changes to your contribution, whether that’s feedback on the scope of your idea, or changes to your code.

3. 👎 Your contribution doesn’t get accepted - Your contribution may or may not be accepted in the end. Hopefully you didn’t put too much work into it already. If you’re not sure why it wasn’t accepted, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask the maintainer for feedback and clarification. Ultimately, however, you’ll need to respect that this is their decision.

4. 🎉 Your contribution gets accepted - Hooray! You’ve successfully made an open source contribution to Factory24.

Now that you're familiar with our contribution model, it's vital that you read and accept our Code of Conduct which all our members, contributers and maintainers are required to enforce.