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Getting started as a contributor

While this project will begin as a traditional open-source community, we eventually hope to provide more formal governance, participation, control rights and recognition of contributions than has been customary in such projects.

We believe such features are important for open-source projects like this one to sustainably scale while staying true to their values. As such, a primary goal of our management of this project will be to clearly and (for the most part) publicly recognize contributions with both qualitative (viz. what kind of contribution was made) and quantitative (viz. how important was the contribution) tokens.

However, these tokens cannot be traded/transferred directly across users; they are relevant only to governance of and participation in this community and are not intended to have any external financial value, except through the value of the community as a whole. We may raise some funds to support the community and the community will govern these funds. However, credit is a marker of contribution and entitlement to governance, not to direct external financial gain.

Contributions will be of many kinds.

Potential ways to contribute

While we cannot hope to anticipate them all types of contributions, here is a short sampling that provides a sense for the range we expect:

  • Translations of the book to other languages and subcultures.
  • Research assistance for and editing of the root text.
  • Thoughtful and accurate prioritization of issues and pull requests.
  • Contributing to or helping maintain the website interface for the book.
  • Graphical design of elements of the book, including visual contributions and figures.
  • Managing data engines and data visualization.
  • Project management of interaction of these elements
  • Contributing to the tools and platforms that support the collaborative process.

Quality of contributions and thus quantity of recognition will largely (with some exceptions discussed below) begin as a discretionary choice of the maintainers. However, we eventually hope to transition an increasing range of the mechanisms through which we give out such recognition to formal community governance, as part of the governance and progressive decentralization below.

All identity roles and credit will initially be public (possibly pseudonymous, but with no internal privacy controls). We hope to introduce some innovative privacy features consistent with the ideas in the book (such as designated verifier signatures) in the future.