Contributing to Cardano Blueprint

Thank you for considering contributing and sharing your knowledge about the Cardano protocol in one capacity or another.

There are basically two ways to contribute:

Validate and provide feedback about existing blueprints
Create or update blueprints

Validate blueprints

As you might have seen, the goal of cardano-blueprint is to create accessible assets that are understandable and useful to wide variety of builders from the Cardano community.

Ask questions

A great way to make sure we cover relevant areas of the Cardano protocol first, is to understand what you are trying to build or understand right now.

We use Q&A discussions to gather immediate questions and use them to identify gaps for where blueprints can help most.

While discussions and providing answers in the Q&A forum are obviously welcome, ideally we would be writing blueprints and be able to answer by pointing future readers there.

If you happen to find the information provided through blueprints useful to your current project, or if you are confused about the why of blueprints, the general category is the right place for that.

Or maybe you have an idea on how we could reach our goals by changing one or the other process? Ideas are collected in the ideas category.

We would love to hear about any feedback! 💙

Report issues

Submit an issue if you spot an errors, or should you encounter a problem with using or contributing to the blueprints themselves.

Write blueprints

Creating or updating blueprints is the bread & butter of this project and anyone is invited to do just that!

The bandwidth of possible contributions is very broad and can range from fixing typos via the Suggest an edit button on the rendered website, over contributing a whole set of documents about how consensus works in Cardano, to including a conformance test suite.

In fact, it’s not even set in stone what a blueprint is and we are gladly exploring any asset that you think covers our values and contributes to reaching the goal of the Cardano Blueprint initiative.

Creating a pull request

Thank you for contributing your changes by opening a pull request!

We do appreciate it if your pull request meets the following criteria:

Description of the changes: providing a clear summary of the changes is beneficial
Quality of changes: ensure that new or updated automated tests validate your changes
Scope: we prefer multiple pull requests that are well-scoped rather than a single large one
Correctness: the pull request should pass the continuous integration (CI) pipeline.

The project is currently in an expand-and-gather phase with no requirement of approvals, but consider requesting for reviews on Github-suggested reviewers.

Anyone is free to fork the repository and we consider pull requests from forks.

The project is currently situated in the cardano-scaling organization, to which we happily invite you and give write permissions onto this repository - so you can pull request from branches directly.

Review contributions

The Cardano Blueprint aims to be a community effort and we would love to have you become a regular visitor and maybe even reviewer of new contributions! 🤝

Publishing

Any changes to the main branch are automatically published to the live version of the blueprints hosted via Github Pages. If you have made changes and they are not propagated to the live version, please check the build status on GitHub Actions, or make sure you fully reload the webpage (Ctrl+Shift+R on firefox).

Versioning

The Cardano Blueprint is currently not versioned, tagged or released.

We are prepared to put such process in place as we see demand from implementations relying on a specific version of test data, interface descriptions or similar contained in cardano-blueprint.

Communication

Besides the many ways to engage through issues and discussions, we also use text and video channels on the Cardano Scaling Discord server for informal chats.

There is a weekly office hours event to which anyone is welcome and we are looking forward to see you there!

Last but not least and probably the best way to contribute: Share the love for blueprints! 📘📐💙