Community
Gesso is an open source community that collectively creates an open source platform. This platform includes open source hardware as defined by the Open Source Hardware Association and open source software as defined by the Open Source Initiative.
Gesso is an open source community. Our approach to open source work is largely based on the Open Source Guides by GitHub. We recommend reading those guides to understand open source communities, especially if you're a new to working in open source communities. A good way to start is by reading Anatomy of an Open Source Project.
There are many ways to contribute to Gesso. These are some of the essential ways to contribute directly to the Gesso community. You can make edits to the wiki; helping maintain the website; contribute ideas and report bugs using as issues using GitHub Issues; update or change the hardware; improve or extend our software libraries; help maintain the operating system distribution; develop, document, and better integrate our distributed manufacturing and fulfillment infrastructure (e.g., 3D printer, integration with printed circuit board manufacturing and industrial design fabrication services), revise documentation for clarity, or suggest interesting research and related projects. We welcome other creative contributions, too.
One of the best ways to discover how you'd like to contribute is to start using Gesso in your own projects. When you do this, try to identify some ways that working with Gesso could be better. (What steps did you take in creating your project that seemed unnecessary? How could you create your project faster?) If you use Gesso in your own projects, you can also create entirely new hardware layers and write new software interfaces for your layer so others in the community can use it in their projects.
Specific suggestions for contributing in these areas are described on the How to Contribute page.
Gesso facilitates a constructive and healthy community with a code of conduct. We have adopted and enforce the Contributor Covenant. We chose this code of conduct because it's consistent with our principles. Specifically, it is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Moreover, it's been adopted in over 40,000 other open source projects, including tools we use, such as curl, Electron, Atom, and Eclipse.
As the guides point out, the a code of conduct is simply a shared document that establishes expectations for behavior for a community's participants. The purpose of adopting and enforcing our code of conduct is to help create a positive social atmosphere for our community to do collaborative work. To learn more about the purpose of a code of conduct in open source communities read the Open Source Guides.
We followed the guide provided by GitHub. GitHub recommends community standards in their Open Source Guide. Additional guidance was taken from the Clef Handbook.
There are a few document components that GitHub recommends as community standards. These are a README, Code of Conduct, Contributing, and License documents.