Accepting Community Contributions to Government Repositories

[wenzowski]

Feature: Accepting Community Contributions to Government Repositories
  As a private citizen
  In order to participate in the open source community
  I would like to voluntarily contribute my code to an official bcgov project

  Scenario:
    Given publicly available source code on github
    When I fork a repository from bcgov
    And I commit code in my forked repository
    And I send a pull request to the upstream bcgov project repository
    And the pull request contribution contains a valuable improvement to the upstream
    Then I would like my contribution to be merged upstream
    And I should accept that my contribution will be redistributed under the terms of the upstream license
    And I should accept that my contribution includes patches to code
    And I should accept that my contribution includes a public record of my name
    And I should accept that my contribution includes a public record of my email

As maintainers, we might require citizens to e-sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before merging their changes, or we might include a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) in the repository they're merging to. In the CLA vs DCO decision some evaluation of the minimum documentation of citizen consent required would be helpful. A DCO is might lighter-weight and the process officially adopted by the Linux Foundation, so a good place to start might be to evaluate the suitability of that approach before evaluating a CLA.