Participate
Participating in a Project
One of the most exciting aspects of open source in general, and the modern "social collaboration" workflow in particular, 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, potentially sparking a productive collaboration.
Because FINOS uses public GitHub repositories for all source code management, we use the GitHub process to support this workflow.
If you are interested in participating in a project and unsure where to start, some project teams will label issues with Help Wanted or Good First Issue labels; ideas to get involved are also socialized in the Foundation's "This Week at FINOS" weekly newsletter (published via the Community mailing list). These issues and calls for help are a great way to get started on contributing to a project, as they have been pre-vetted by the project team in order to not be overly complex or time consuming to implement.
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. Most projects host an issue tracker on their GitHub repository, and if not will provide instructions on where issues should be raised instead.
Participation in any FINOS activity is open to anyone, whether you work in financial services or not, and regardless of your development background.
That being said, for a pull request to be merged (accepted) you will need to have met FINOS contribution requirements; notably you will be required to have a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) in place with the Foundation. Read more about CLAs and our EasyCLA tool here
Some projects may have additional contributing guidelines and requirements; such as requiring a particular coding standard. These will usually be documented using GitHub's Contributing Guidelines feature, meaning that you will see a link to the guidelines from various places in the GitHub UI. Before contributing to a project, we encourage you to get familiar with the project's contributing guidelines, as doing so will help minimize the number of spurious review and edit cycles that your Pull Request needs to go through. As a project maintainer, you can leverage the template Project Blueprint provided by FINOS to jumpstart your project with proper contribution guidelines.
Participating in a Special Interest Group (SIG)
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. A list of current SIGs is available here. SIG governance is documented here.
The first steps to participate in a SIG are to subscribe to the SIG's mailing list and attend the group's scheduled meetings.
SIGs are expected to document participation eligibility criteria, their mailing list information and meeting information on their GitHub repository.
SIGs may create and enforce additional participation eligibility criteria or requirements; 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.