If you're on this page because you'd like to contribute to the Playbook, that's fantastic! Thank you for getting involved ❤️
Contributing to the Playbook is for everyone. Whether you work at Springer Nature or not, the Playbook is for you - a guide to good working standards and practices that support healthy, happy teams. You don't need to be a developer to get involved. We cover many areas, from cultural and technical writing to specific technical practices. Please adhere to our house style and inclusive language guidelines when you make your contributions.
You can get involved in discussions in issues and pull requests. Sometimes we need a discussion to come to an agreement on a particular issue before a pull request is opened. Sometimes a pull request will be discussed. Both types of discussion help bring us to a common understanding, and your input at this stage is really valuable.
Our issues list is half to-do list, half discussion. Not every issue will produce a pull request, and some issues may produce multiple pull requests.
Create an issue if you notice that there's something missing from the Playbook. If you'd like to discuss the issue with others, use a label like "collaboration", "help wanted", or "question". If you intend to open a pull request to resolve the issue you've created, consider assigning the issue to yourself.
A good issue is sufficiently detailed for anybody to be able to understand what it's about. If there are existing issues already created that are related to yours, then please link to them to provide further context.
Please create a new short-lived feature branch for your changes, then create a pull request. Once your changes have been approved, you can merge them to the default branch. Read more about what we're looking for when we review.
Include a summary of your pull request when you open it. We prefer to use commit messages to explain what a change will do, and pull request summaries to explain why the change was made. Read further guidelines on commit messages - many of these guidelines can also apply to pull request summaries!
If you work at Springer Nature, please remember to keep discussion inside the issues and pull requests, avoiding Slack, hallway conversations etc. Remember that this repo is public, and the discussions we have can be of benefit to people apart from us.
With short-lived feature branches, a key rule is that branches should be quickly merged and deleted.
With a playbook PR, this rule does not apply. The aim is to get many people reading or contributing-to the pull request (and the likelihood of a conflict upon merge is very very low).
Because of this, it is fine (in many cases highly desired) to propose something, then wait a week or so before reminding people that there is a PR open. Let people know you'll be merging in a week or so, assuming there's no continuing discussion. That way, more people will have a chance to contribute.
A bot notifies the #frontend Slack room when work is merged, because changes to the playbook are relevant to all Frontend developers at Springer Nature.
We hope the wider development community will be interested in the work we have committed here. We welcome feedback and involvement from all - so feel free to link to your latest contribution on your social media platform of choice.