Short Contributing primer document

Problem

I find the size of the hosted docs (readthedocs) overwhelming. I imagine it’s simply good documentation, but it’s hard for me to skim.

Solution

I think a succinct primer for contributors would positively influence #1678 (looking for maintainers & contributors). Basically, a rudimentary contributing.md on GitHub. I think it should be on github, because it’s much easier to stay on GitHub if you don’t need in-depth docs.

I’m envisioning something with the following:

• Links to contributor & user support channels.
• Ways to help (PRs, triage, etc.)
• Important rules for PRs
• Setup-and-run guide

[allejo]

All we really have right now is GitHub issues. Members of the core team have a Slack that we really don’t use.

@egor-rogov @allejo What do you all think of opening up Slack or should be simply start a gitter or something else? I’m not opposed to a more official real-time “place”, just I’m not sure it would really get lots/any of traffic…

Wait, there’s a Slack channel?

I don’t see the harm in opening up Slack. I personally am not part of any communities that use Gitter and I’m personally not looking to download yet another chat client on my computer.

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I think there should definitely be a CONTRIBUTING.md file since GitHub will notify users of it when they open up a PR. My worry is that information would be duplicated between GitHub and RTD. I would like to see CONTRIBUTING.md focus solely on how to actually contribute to the project (like how to make PRs, a brief summary of the project structure, and commands to run). The rest of the more detailed docs (everything on RTD) should just be linked to from GitHub.

[joshgoebel]

Any reason we can’t make this a WIP PR so I have all the usual github annotation tools?