Contribution of code to an existing FINOS project

The easiest way to engage is to contribute code, documentation, test cases, requirements, issues and pull requests, etc. to projects that are currently within the Foundation. A great place to start is the good first issues in the FINOS GitHub organization.

Before contributing to a project, community members are encouraged to take a "participate first, contribute second" approach whereby they first familiarize themselves with a project by doing any or all of the following:

• Attend a couple of project or working group meetings (note: not all projects run regularly scheduled meetings)

• Follow and participate in discussions within the participate first meetings that are attended.

• Getting involved in discussions within a project or working group's respective Google Group mailing list. 

Often, though not always, after getting familiar with a project's work, usually by attending a project meeting and/or participating in FINOS working groups a contributor may choose to start making concrete contributions to currently active FINOS projects. Contributions can take various forms:

• Creating/Identifying a GitHub/GitLab Issue

• Starting a new discussion thread

• Extending and amending documentation (**)

• Actively raising code contributions (**)

** Forms of contribution that require a contributor to make git commits, and in turn, request those to be merged via pull requests, must have a Contributor License Agreement in place within FINOS. See box on the right column for details.

Contribution of an existing code base into FINOS as a new project

Do you have an existing product, project, or activity that would be a good fit within the FINOS community? Here's how to propose a new contribution.

Pre-Work: Contribution Fitness

First off, you want to evaluate whether the contribution is suitable for a Foundation-hosted open source project, in terms of long term expectations and desire to build a diverse Community of adopters and contributors. 

Since every Project contributed to the Foundation comes into an Incubating stage, a comprehensive set of criteria to review to evaluate contribution fitness is the Incubation checklist.  Contributors are encouraged to evaluate the checklist and ensure they are willing to achieve those criteria before, during and after contribution.

For Projects initiated by FINOS Members, there’s the opportunity to carry out a pre-incubation so called Formation stage, where the FINOS team and Members can support the contributor to socialize, gauge interest and ready the project for open sourcing.

Step 1 (optional but recommended): Gauge Community interest 

You are encouraged to email directly to the Community at community@finos.org (subscribe here) to outline your contribution idea and gauge interest or you can reach you directly to the FINOS team at help@finos.org. Note that while everyone is welcome to contribute to existing projects, only FINOS Members can propose new projects. If you are not a Member this step is particularly important to identify a Member who could be a sponsor for your project.

Step 2: Submit a contribution proposal

Draft a proposal to be reviewed by the FINOS team of the program you've chosen. Your proposal should include the following headings:

1. Business problem: the business problem the contribution solves.

2. Proposed solution: how the proposed contribution solves that business problem. For software projects, include a detailed description of the software and it's functionality.

3. Current state: a summary of the contribution's history and status. Include information about the contribution's maturity and roadmap.

4. Existing materials: links to and descriptions of any existing project materials (e.g. GitHub repositories). If any materials are currently private, please describe them in detail. The Foundation will reach out about providing access to FINOS and the program PMC for evaluation.

5. Development team: current contributors, including full name, affiliation, work email address, and GitHub.com username where available.

6. Contributor commitment: describe the resources you'll commit to supporting the contribution should it be accepted by the Foundation. This might include developer time (in FTEs), marketing support, Foundation membership, etc.

You can Submit your proposal based on this template, which will create a new issue on the FINOS Github Community (a free Github account is required). 

To review previous contribution proposals (to see examples, or to see if someone has contributed something similar, etc) you can search our Github contribution issues history and the (now deprecated) Contribution Jira board. 

Compliance review & IP transition

Once a contribution is raised, the Foundation will perform an audit to ensure the contribution is consistent with the FINOS contribution compliance requirements. In addition to having contributor agreements for each contributor (see tooltip), the main steps are:

• Transferring the project trademark to FINOS, or selecting a new name for the FINOS project that does not conflict with any existing marks, so that FINOS can enforce the project's rights consistent with our Trademark Guidelines.

• Compliance with third-party licenses and the FINOS acceptable Apache-compatible license policy.

• Compliance with FINOS notice requirements for IP notices, contributor attribution, etc - this can happen right after the contribution (see incubating criteria)

Step 3: FINOS Approval

Once legal and IP review is complete, the FINOS team will review the proposal and work with the Governing Board where appropriate to make a decision on approving the project. 

The FINOS team will review your proposal for alignment with the scope and objectives of the Foundation, viability, perceived interest within the FINOS community. The FINOS may contact the submitter for more information during its evaluation, and will typically be providing constant updates on the progress of the approval process.

Step 4: Transfer and Review of Contribution Materials

Following contribution approval, the FINOS infrastructure team will work with the contributing organization to transfer existing code and other materials to the project's collaboration infrastructure (e.g. its GitHub repository, project web site, and/or wiki space) and set for permissions for the initial list of maintainers. This can happen by giving access to an existing DVCS repository to the FINOS team or Sending the FINOS team an archive containing the code to be contributed. See Code Transfer options.

It's during this step as well that code validation and scanning of the code base with be performed, any build processes set up and configured, and the various components of the FINOS Open Developer Platform (ODP) configured and set up for the project, at which point the rest of the Foundation's infrastructure will be available to the project contributors moving forward to use to develop, test and release the project.

Have questions?

If you'd like help, don't hesitate to reach out by email to help@finos.org or ask the wider community with a note to community@finos.org.