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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to matrix.org

Thank you for taking the time to contribute to Matrix!

This is the repository for the matrix.org website.

Sign off

We ask that everybody who contributes to this project signs off their contributions, as explained below.

We follow a simple 'inbound=outbound' model for contributions: the act of submitting an 'inbound' contribution means that the contributor agrees to license their contribution under the same terms as the project's overall 'outbound' license - in our case, this is Apache Software License v2 (see LICENSE-Apache-2.0) for code and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (see LICENSE-CC-BY-SA) for other things, including text and graphics.

In order to have a concrete record that your contribution is intentional and you agree to license it under the same terms as the project's license, we've adopted the same lightweight approach used by the Linux Kernel, Docker, and many other projects: the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). This is a simple declaration that you wrote the contribution or otherwise have the right to contribute it to Matrix:

Developer Certificate of Origin
Version 1.1

Copyright (C) 2004, 2006 The Linux Foundation and its contributors.
660 York Street, Suite 102,
San Francisco, CA 94110 USA

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this
license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1

By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:

(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
    have the right to submit it under the open source license
    indicated in the file; or

(b) The contribution is based upon previous work that, to the best
    of my knowledge, is covered under an appropriate open source
    license and I have the right under that license to submit that
    work with modifications, whether created in whole or in part
    by me, under the same open source license (unless I am
    permitted to submit under a different license), as indicated
    in the file; or

(c) The contribution was provided directly to me by some other
    person who certified (a), (b) or (c) and I have not modified
    it.

(d) I understand and agree that this project and the contribution
    are public and that a record of the contribution (including all
    personal information I submit with it, including my sign-off) is
    maintained indefinitely and may be redistributed consistent with
    this project or the open source license(s) involved.

If you agree to this for your contribution, then all that's needed is to include the line in your commit or pull request comment:

Signed-off-by: Your Name <[email protected]>

Git allows you to add this signoff automatically when using the -s flag to git commit, which uses the name and email set in your user.name and user.email git configs.

What we are trying to achieve

One key mission of the Foundation is to make Matrix a mainstream protocol. For this, onboarding needs to be made easy for new users. The Matrix.org website is a critical step in this journey: this is where people land when they look up "what is Matrix chat" or "chatting on Matrix" in a search engine.

The primary mission of the matrix.org website is to onboard various populations on Matrix, and turn them into supporters of the project.

We identified 4 different kind of populations that we want to address with the Matrix.org website.

  • Everyday people who want to use Matrix for instant messaging with family and friends. They are not tech savvy and just want simple steps to follow, and something that "just works™". They don't particularly care about Matrix. They could use WhatsApp or Signal.
  • Community managers who want to find a platform for their community to talk on. They could use Slack or Discord.
  • Developers who want to create clients, servers, bridges or bots. They are tech literate and are interested in how things work from a technical perspective. They are already convinced Matrix is useful and want either to create toys for it, or Matrix-based tools for production.
  • Entrepreneurs who were told about Matrix and who need to see how it can bring value to them to create products based on Matrix.

How we measure progress

The tools we have at our disposal are:

  • Privacy-preserving analytics with Plausible.io (rationale here). They allow us to track which are the most popular pages, custom events (e.g. to track if a call to action is often clicked on or not), and funnels
  • User feedback, which will necessarily suffer the survivor bias

How we take decisions

We try to keep a paper trail for all the decisions and implementation:

  • All of the changes on the website need to happen through a Pull Request
    • The only exception to this rules are if we broke things preventing our usual workflow.
  • Pull Requests which do changes to existing content or add content outside of the blog should fix a documented and accepted issue
  • Issues are reviewed by the maintainers of the project (@thibaultamartin and @MTRNord as of now). Some discussion can happen in #matrix.org-website:matrix.org but all decisions are logged in the issues themselves.

We keep this paper trail to avoid having to review Pull Requests "fixing" things we don't need or want to be fixed. Of course we try to remain flexible where it makes sense, but want to stick to this process as much as possible.