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Open Source Guide

Open Source Skeleton Template

Open source projects in good order contain a set of meta-documents that help users and contributors interact with our projects. We provide this template as a guide for our open source projects. This template is informed by GitHub’s community guide. Please delete this file before publishing project to public repository.

Meta-documents for Projects

  • Description. Every project should be able to describe itself in one short sentence. Why? Because project names are not always descriptive and README files can get lengthy. Tell users what this project is for, so they can decide to explore or move on.
  • README. The bulk of project information goes here. Note, this is not for project documentation. Use GitHub pages for documentation. Follow the README Template for details. If publishing a binary (e.g. Docker container), we provide you with an additional template for you to use.
  • Code of conduct. We make explicit that we invite everyone to our project and expect professional conduct. We elaborate on the process to address misconduct issues. Review the details here.
  • Contributing. Contributing files help contributors understand how to interact with the project. Contributors will see the information in the contributing file before they create a PR to your project. Include what they should know before contributing. Some of our projects are intended to be read-only (e.g. a publication of code associated with a research paper). We’ve added a version for static projects you can use too.
  • License. Our open source projects will have an explicit License file.
  • Issue template. We encourage projects to make it easy for people to add issues that we can act upon. An Issue Template file helps organize issue information so that project maintainers get the information they need.
  • Pull request template. A Pull Request Template file helps contributors clarify what they are contributing to and why. It also includes a declaration confirming they have the authority to contribute the code under the project license.

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