Add a contributing guide

[github-learning-lab]

Step 8: Add a CONTRIBUTING guide

A contributing guide provides important information to those who are interested in helping you with your project. Without a contributing guide, they might not know what you need help with, how they can get started, or how you like to communicate.

Providing the baseline expectations for a contribution to your project makes it much easier for a new user to contribute to the growth and development of your project.

What to include

Like the user facing documentation, the contributing guidelines for every project will be very different. Let's keep our first iteration simple and focus on letting people know our system for labels. Don't worry, we'll talk more about labels after you make these edits.

⌨️ Activity: Adding CONTRIBUTING guidelines

You can follow the manual steps below, or accept the suggested change in the following comment.

1. Edit CONTRIBUTING.md on this branch, or manually edit it in the Files Changed tab.
2. Find the text marked DESCRIPTION PLACEHOLDER.
3. Replace each placeholder with a description for each label.
4. After editing the CONTRIBUTING.md file, scroll down and click the Commit changes button.

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I'll respond when I detect a commit on this branch.

[github-learning-lab]

Step 9: Add labels

The open source community uses labels to help organize issues and pull requests within their repositories. They also use them to identify issues and pull requests that are looking for contributions from newcomers or to highlight specific skills needed to respond to the request.

By default, a new GitHub repository comes with the following labels out of the box:

• bug
• duplicate
• enhancement
• help wanted
• invalid
• question
• wontfix

These initial labels are awesome, but most maintainers add (or delete) labels to fit their project. Labels like first-timers-only make it easy for newcomers to find suitable issues and pull requests, but they also tell the world you are welcoming and supportive to new open source contributors.

⌨️ Activity: Adding labels to your repository

1. On the top right side of this pull request view, find the section titled: "Labels".
2. Click the gear icon.
3. Notice the text field at the top says Filter labels.
4. Type the name of the label you would like to create.
5. You will see a selection that reads "Create a new label", select that option.
6. Customize your label with a description and color.
7. Click Save.
8. Add your new label to this pull request.

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I'll respond when I detect a label on this pull request.

[github-learning-lab]

Step 10: Merge the CONTRIBUTING guide

Nice work @jason-ocean! You successfully added labels to this project. Labels will help Mona and her community keep things organized and quickly identify what an issue or pull request is trying to accomplish.

Go ahead and merge the CONTRIBUTING.md guide.

⌨️ Activity: Approve the pull request

1. Clicking on this quicklink
2. Select Approve
3. Click Submit review.

You can also approve by clicking on Files changed, clicking on Review changes, selecting Approve and then Submit review.

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I'll respond when you've approved this pull request.

[github-learning-lab]

There are just a few more things left to do. First, you need to let the world know how they can use Mona's project and second, you need to let them know the kind of behavior Mona expects.

Mona has done a ton of research on licenses, let's see which one she has selected.

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Go to the pull request here.