Contribute
Quickstart
If you want the tl;dr of how to start contributing to FINOS, a great starting point is our Community Quickstart page.
Also most projects will label issues with Help Wanted or Good First Issue labels, as desirable and not overly complex. Take a look at a FINOS wide list of Good First Issues / Help Wanted.
For more information, keep reading below.
Contributing to a Project
One of the most exciting aspects of open source is that participation is not restricted to a core development team. Anyone can fork a project at any time, make changes and improvements, and submit those changes back for review and incorporation into the parent repository. FINOS provides a transparent governance that encourages individual contributors, financial insitutions, fintechs and technology companies alike to work collaborative on our projects.
No paid Membership is required, and everyone is welcome to contribute to an existing project in the FINOS landscape, whether it's an open source software (OSS) project, an open standard project or a Special Interest Group (SIG).
Open Source Software Projects
Contributing to an existing Software Project
- Choose a project in our Landscape or if you don't know where to start, take a look at the list of Good First Issues on Github where projects are actively seeking for help!
- Take look a how to contribute to an existing project
- You or your company will need a valid Contributor License Agreement, which can be easily completed online via EasyCla
The Foundation also encourages non-code contributions in the form of issues - bug reports and enhancement requests -, and documentation updates. This means that you do not need to be a developer to contribute to FINOS projects. These are also highly valued contributions, and project teams appreciate non-code contributions just as much as code-level contributions.
Project specific guidelines
Some projects may have additional contributing guidelines and requirements; such as requiring a particular coding standard or following a specific review process. In order to maximize the chances of your contribution being accepted, take a look at the CONTRIBUTING.MD file of the project you are contributing to. The Contributor Cheat Sheet is a great resource to help here.
Contributing a new Software Project
FINOS follows a formal structured process of proposal, community socialization and approval for our projects. Take a look at how to contribute a new project to FINOS.
If/ once the project is approved, the FINOS team will create the project based on the Software Project Blueprint to jumpstart your project with proper contribution guidelines.
NOTE: Only FINOS Members are allowed to propose new contributions or you will need at least one Member to support / vouch you contribution.
Contributing to an Open Standard project
Given their non-code nature, FINOS Open Standard projects follow a different governance and rules for participation will be documented in the standard specific documentation.
Once you have identified a project you'd like to participate to take a look at the FINOS Community calendar to attend the next the next standard meeting. Agendas will be published in advance typically in the project github issues.
Participating in a Special Interest Group (SIG)
Contribute your use case in our Special Interest Group
FINOS Special Interest Groups (SIGs) provide a venue for financial services participants to discuss common challenges, use cases, and topics of interest that they would like to tackle through open source collaboration. Your input would be extremely valuable to help focus and influence foundation activities.
Everyone can join a SIG by subscribing to the SIG mailing list and attend the group's scheduled meetings. For a list of active SIGs refer to the SIGs page or the FINOS landscape.
SIG governance is very lightweight, and SIGs are generally document target audience, their mailing list information and meeting information in their Github repository.
SIGs may create and enforce additional desirability criteria for participants; an example might be to require a particular area of industry expertise (e.g., interest rate swaps) or knowledge of a programming language (e.g., C++) or library. These criteria should also be clearly documented on the SIG's documentation page.
Contribute to our blog
A great way to contribute besides code, issues or documentation is to contribute content to our Community blog - we welcome FINOS projects related topics (technical or not) and more broadly open source topics relevant for the financial services industry. Send your proposed article to marketing@finos.org.