Contributing

To quickly start contributing, review issues here

By contributing to this project, you dedicate your work to the public domain and relinquish any copyright claims under the terms of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. See the license file for additional information.

How to Contribute

This project constitutes a collaborative work (“open source”). Federal employees and members of the public are encouraged to improve the project by contributing.

Contributions can be made, primarily in three ways:

Easiest

Email the USDA Data Standards team with comments and suggestions.

Easy

  1. Browse the content at http://usda.github.io/data-standards
  2. Click “Improve Content” in the bottom left corner of any page
  3. Make changes as you would normally
  4. Click “Submit”.
  5. You change should appear once approved.

Note: You may need to create a free GitHub account if you do not already have one

Advanced

  1. Configure git by using this basic tutorial or by downloading the GitHub for Mac (or GitHub for Windows) and optionally Mou.
  2. Fork the project
  3. Make changes as you would normally using the tools installed in step #1.
  4. Push the changes back to your fork
  5. Submitting a pull request to this repository
  6. You change should appear once approved.

Running Locally

USDA Data Standards runs on GitHub pages and automatically regenerates as a static site after every change. To duplicate this process and preview changes locally:

  1. git clone https://github.com/usda/data-standards.git && cd data-standards
  2. script/bootstrap
  3. (Make your changes)
  4. script/server
  5. Open localhost:4000 in your favorite web browser

Note: You’ll need Ruby and the Bundler package manager.

Privacy

All comments, messages, pull requests, and other submissions received through official USDA pages including this GitHub page may be subject to archiving requirements.