Contribution guidelines needs rework or should be dropped

[chalin]

We have the following "contributing" resources that overlap (at least in part) in their content:

• https://opentelemetry.io/docs/contribution-guidelines/
• https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
• https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

We should consolidate these resources to avoid overlap. One idea is to drop the website page, and simply refer interested readers to one of the CONTRIBUTING.md pages.

Note that some pages refer to https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io/blob/.*?/README.md and should changed to refer to the contributing page.

Related:

• Information Architecture (IA): 2021 assessment, proposal and rework #770

[austinlparker]

I'd drop the contribution page and refer to CONTRIBUTING.md in each repo.

[chalin]

Atm, I'd vote for a Contributing page (or pages) on the website. Let me put together a proposal.

[alolita]

@austinlparker @chalin Typically all open source contributors are used to looking for contributing.md on the repo they're working in. For example, on OTel we have several language communities which don't necessarily intersect with what the Collector community is working on.

I suggest having a centralized page in the community repo to keep the general contribution guidelines centralized. And still keep a contributing.md in each repo that points to this centralized community repo page.

[svrnm]

I think what the website should have is different from the CONTRIBUTING.md(s) the individual repos have: it should be more like an entry point for contributors on "you want to contribute? awesome, come to our SIG meetings/slack channels/browse the repositories, here are some links to the community/SIG repos you might find interesting". Additionally we could still consider making a COPY of https://github.com/open-telemetry/community/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md and host it on the website for people to find it.

[hughesjj]

I'd like to "point" the non-website contirbution guidelines to the website for easier link maintenance while maintaining a single source of truth. Any non-trivial documentation or otel processes should also be easily "localized" which imo is better to handle in the website than having n different markdown files collocated in a repo etc

[chalin]

Thanks all for your feedback. As was discussed during the Comms meeting (23/6/5), my point of reference / example was https://kubernetes.io/docs/contribute. I'll see how much inspiration (and content) we can get from that section of the K8S docs.

[alolita]

@chalin Thanks! Is there a proposal doc or issue for the contribution guidelines changes being suggested. A collaborative doc would help everyone provide feedback in an open source process. Imo, we should totally use k8s docs and other open source project docs as examples for reference but apply only what works for our project communities.