Challenge.Gov is an open source platform that accepts contributions and feedback from our customers.

Code of Conduct

Challenge.Gov is committed to building a safe, welcoming, harassment-free culture for everyone. Challenge.Gov is a part of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) within the General Services Administration (GSA), and we expect everyone to follow the GSA TTS Code of Conduct.

We encourage you to read this platform’s DEVCONFIG, its LICENSE, and its README. If you want to read more about our open source policy or have questions, check out the GSA’s Open Source Policy (https://open.gsa.gov/oss/ or send us an email.

How you can contribute

Anyone can contribute to Challenge.Gov. Whether it's notifying us of an issue, proposing a new feature, or suggestions for content or workflow improvements, we welcome your ideas on how to improve this site.

First time contributor? We’re here to help guide you through a successful contribution. We review all contributions before merging them into Challenge.Gov. If you’re unsure about anything, just ask (mailto:team@challenge.Gov).

Before submitting a contribution, you’ll just need to create a GitHub account or sign in to your existing account.

Submitting bugs and issues

If something isn’t working the way it's supposed to:

Email (mailto:team@Challenge.Gov) and document how to reproduce the bug. Before submitting a bug, try to recreate it and document the steps we can take to reproduce it. If you can, take screen shots to capture specific details about the bug. This helps us understand its context. We can only fix bugs that we're able to understand and reproduce.

To Contribute to fixing bugs, developing features and enhancements

Before submitting a contribution, you’ll just need to create a GitHub account or sign in to your existing account.

Fork this repo into your GitHub account. Read more about forking a repo on GitHub. Create a branch from production and name it in a way that lightly defines what you’re working on (for example, add-styles). Once you’re ready to submit a pull request, fill out the [pull request template (https://github.com/GSA/Challenge_gov/compare) Submit your pull request against the main branch.

If the pull request is accepted, we will merge the pull request for you.

How we prioritize

Once you’ve submitted a contribution, we'll review the code and triage it based on the following considerations:

1. Severity: What type of functionality is impacted? Is there a workaround?
2. Priority: Does this align with our vision and roadmap goals?
3. Size: Can we accomplish this in a 2 week sprint or will this take longer?

Note: We prioritize issues that affect accessibility, user experience, and system security.

These considerations help us decide if and when we can work on the issue. If the issue is accepted, we will schedule them for an upcoming 2-week sprint.

Common terms

There can be a lot of jargon when discussing how you can contribute to Challenge.Gov. We’ve included some common terms we use below.

• Bug - problem resulting in something not working properly or as expected.
• Enhancement - a proposal to make something existing work better.
• Feature request - a proposal for something new to be added to the system.
• Fork - a copy of a repository that you manage.
• Open source - something that can be viewed, modified, and shared by anyone in the public with permissions enforced through an open source license.
• Pull request - a way to notify project team members when a contributor/developer wants to merge new code changes into a main project repository. You can read more on GitHub, (https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/proposing-changes-to-your-work-with-pull-requests/about-pull-requests).
• Repository (aka repo) - In Github, a repository contains all your projects’ files and each of their revisions. You can read more on GitHub (https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/about-repositories).
• Roadmap - a summary that outlines a product’s goals, priorities, and progress over a period of time.