What is a Project Guideline?

A set of rules that contributors should follow for a project.

It may include:

Why?

Everyone comes from different backgrounds.

Inconsistency == Ineffectiveness

Give Us Some Examples!

https://github.com/airbnb/javascript​

Marketplace for Vacation Homes

Airbnb

https://github.com/mono/website/blob/gh-pages/community/contributing/coding-guidelines.md

Open-source implementation of .NET

Mono

Give Us Some Examples!

https://github.com/elsewhencode/project-guidelines

Technology Design Studio in London

Elsewhen

https://github.com/atom/atom/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md​

Open-source code editor

Atom

Why Make Our Own Guidelines?

If people have made other guidelines. Why not use those?

Why do it democratically?

Team leads can dictate + impose guidelines for others to follow. So why the democracy?

How to do it democratically?

Git, Issues and Pull Requests

How to do it democratically?

• To discuss something - raise an issue

• To change something - create a PR

• Any discussion / feedback are done on the issue / PR comments

• After agreement is reached, approve or reject the issue / PR

• If accepted, the issue / PR is assigned to the person responsible for making the change

Why Git + GitHub?

• Transparency - the rationale is documented as comments and commit messages, and can be referred to if a similar argument arises again

• Open + Inclusive - Issues and PRs can be openly-discussed. Everyone can be involved, even if they're working remotely.

• Encourage Engagement - participation means you can make your own life easier

• Aggregate Issues - issue tracker allows you to collect issues to dicuss, altogether, in one effective meeting, instead of many ineffective meetings, one for each issue.