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Contributing to Hypercerts

Thank you for your interest in contributing to hypercerts.

Hypercerts are open infrastructure for representing work, evidence, and evaluation. Contributions are not limited to code: evaluation, review, and conceptual feedback are core to the project.

This document explains how to get involved.

Who can contribute?

We welcome contributions from:

  • developers and protocol designers
  • evaluators and reviewers
  • researchers and domain experts
  • documentation and tooling contributors

You do not need prior involvement with the project to contribute.

Types of contributions

Code and technical work

  • protocol or schema changes
  • reference implementations
  • tooling and integrations
  • tests and examples

Evaluation and review

  • reviewing schemas or design proposals
  • giving feedback on data models and tradeoffs
  • testing representations against real-world use cases
  • contributing example evaluations or assessment patterns

Documentation and conceptual work

  • improving clarity of existing documentation
  • identifying ambiguities or missing concepts
  • writing examples or explanatory material
  • proposing alternative designs or extensions

How to contribute

1. Start with discussion

If you are unsure whether a contribution is in scope, start by:

Early discussion is encouraged, especially for design or evaluation-related changes.

2. Propose changes

For concrete contributions:

  • fork the repository
  • create a branch
  • open a pull request with a clear description of:
    • what you are changing
    • why the change is needed
    • any relevant tradeoffs or open questions

3. Review process

  • Maintainers review contributions in public
  • Feedback and iteration are part of the process
  • Not all proposals will be accepted, but all good-faith contributions will be considered

Evaluation contributions

Some parts of the hypercerts ecosystem explicitly involve evaluation and judgment.

If you are contributing:

  • example evaluations
  • assessment criteria
  • review methodologies
  • structured feedback on existing records

please clearly state:

  • the perspective or domain you are evaluating from
  • any assumptions or limitations
  • whether the contribution is illustrative or normative

This helps others reuse and interpret evaluations appropriately.

Community standards

All contributors are expected to follow the project’s Code of Conduct.

See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for details.

Licensing

By contributing to this repository, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the project’s open-source license, as specified in the LICENSE file.

Questions?

If you’re not sure how to contribute, open an issue and describe what you’d like to do. Maintainers or other contributors will help point you in the right direction.