CONTRIBUTING.md

How to contribute

• Fork the repository to your own GitHub account.

• Set up your development environment according to instructions either in the README.md or in any official documentation, which will be published online, or will be in the docs directory. If we don't yet have proper documentation for setting up a development environment, please raise an issue to let us know.

• Ideally, you should discuss the proposed change with our team, because we can only accept pull requests with an accepted need for a new feature or fix.

• We can discuss your proposed implementation of the new feature, for maximum potential 'mergeability' of your PR.

• Try to keep commits small and atomic, and use a descriptive commit message. We may wish to 'cherry pick' specific commits where the entire PR is not suitable for merging, and small atomic commits make this easier.

• Once you are ready to show us your work, create a pull request on our repo, detailing what the change is and details about the fix or feature. PRs that affect any 'mission critical' part of the code will need suitable tests which we can run.

• We will endeavour to review and merge in a reasonable time frame, but will usually not merge straight into master, rather we will merge into an upcoming release branch.

Coding style

• Please try to adhere to accepted best practices for code linting, formatting, according to the language in question. We will try to publish a style guide for each language we use, but if we haven't yet, please use your best judgement.

Intellectual Property (IP) of contributions

• The copyright over the IP in all RCPCH repositories is owned by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, which releases it under an open source license. Consult the individual repository for specifics on which license we have used.

• If you submit a contribution to the repository, we ask that you agree to transfer all IP rights of the contribution, both now and in the future, to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, in perpetuity. This clause is purely to allow RCPCH to continue to exert an unchallenged copyright over the open source work. Asserting a copyright is fundamental to all open source work, and is for the wider benefit of the digital health community.

• For larger contributions, we may require a Contributor Covenant to support this agreement over transfer of title, however for small contributions, it is probably sufficient that you have read and understood this document, and that the act of submitting a PR is acceptance of these terms.

• All contributors will, of course, proudly be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section (if you make a PR, don't forget to add yourself there!).

This file was automatically added to this repo from the RCPCH's defaults repository, rcpch/.github