Guidance around level 1 information requirements (contributing, versioning, roadmap)

[JamesNK]

These 4 requirements under level 1:

• Most code changes are performed via PRs, and open to community feedback and transparent viewing. The specific review and merge process used is a project choice.
• Versioning and breaking change policy is documented.
• Roadmap is documented, via formal document and/or an issue query.
• Build scripts are documented and can be readily used by consumers.

I think there should be some (optional) guidance about what this documentation should look like and where it should live. e.g.

• Document discussing making PRs and the process: CONTRIBUTING.md
• Document discussing versioning: VERSIONING.md
• Document discussing roadmap: ROADMAP.md
• Document discussing build: probably also in CONTRIBUTING.md

I don't know if VERSIONING.md/ROADMAP.md are things, I just made them up. Would be worth investigating other eco-systems to see whether they have standards around these documents.

Also a template or example would be useful. In the long term I think you'll save time in giving feedback by having a sample/template of each document to give to projects.

By having some (optional) guidance and structure around these files it will help the community. People will know there are common places they can look in source repositories to find this information.

[JamesNK]

Example: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java

It has:

• CODE-OF-CONDUCT.md
• COMPILING.md
• CONTRIBUTING.md
• GOVERNANCE.md
• SECURITY.md
• RELEASING.md

Wouldn't it be great if you could go to .NET open source projects and see this information available is a consistent manner.

[haacked]

I like the spirit of this idea. In fact, if you host your project on GitHub, it has a page where you can see how your project fares according to its community standards: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/community

I think that would be a nice recommended set of documentation. It's a shorter list than what @JamesNK wrote. But a some of the files listed could be merged together. For example, COMPILING.md might be part of CONTRIBUTING.md or the README.md. Ideally it's a one-liner with a build script. :smile: