CONTRIBUTING

Contribute without collapsing source evidence, policy and physical execution.

OpenRGD accepts specification work, candidate contracts, tooling, tests and experiments. The required process depends on what kind of authority the change would modify.

CITATION RECORD

Canonical source ↗Citation guide →

MATURITYCONTRIBUTION WORKFLOW SUMMARY

LAST VERIFIED27 Sep 2026

SOURCE VERSIONCONTRIBUTING.md + GOVERNANCE.md · snapshot afe1a831

EVIDENCE BOUNDARYWeb summary; canonical contribution and governance files remain authoritative.

CHANGE CLASS

Choose the authority class before writing the patch.

Normative specification / governance

Accepted semantics, governance, conformance, canonical hashing and ownership changes require evidence and the RFC/decision process where applicable.

Candidate / experiment

Candidate material must declare maturity, provenance and open questions and cannot silently change accepted behavior.

Toolchain

CLI, validator, importer and static-export changes must not privately redefine the standard and should fail closed where evidence is missing.

Fixtures / examples

Fixtures must be reviewable, redistribution-safe, hermetic or explicit about dependencies, free of secrets and exercised by automated tests.

WORKFLOW

Small coherent change → validation → pull request → explicit merge readiness.

01Branch from protected main

Use a fork or branch from the current protected default branch.

02Make the smallest coherent change

Keep authority and migration impact reviewable.

03Add tests and documentation

Update changelog and decision evidence when the change requires it.

04Validate locally

Run repository, artifact, hash, runtime-boundary, governance, contract and pytest validation.

05Open a pull request

Complete the PR template and resolve review conversations.

06Record readiness

Required CI must be green on the final head before merge.

LOCAL VALIDATION

Run the same boundaries the repository expects.

Recommended checks

python -m pip install -e .
python tools/validate_repository.py
python tools/reconcile_artifacts.py
python tools/validate_canonical_hash.py
python tools/validate_runtime_boundary.py
python tools/validate_governance.py
python contracts/agent/v0.1.0/validate.py
python -m pytest -q

PHYSICAL BOUNDARY

This repository does not implement physical execution.

Runtime or Body Adapter work belongs in the responsible implementation repository. If it exposes a missing OpenRGD contract, return that gap to the canonical repository as an explicit Contract Delta or RFC rather than connecting cognition directly to motors.

START

Read the canonical guide, then propose the smallest reviewable change.

Canonical repository ↗Open RFC ↗Community →