How do I start contributing

--- tags: meta title: How do I start contributing --- ## Welcome 👋 If you're reading this, we cannot thank you enough 😃 It's our pleasure to have someone as interested as you going through this. It's ok, it might seem overwhelming at first, but everyone has something to offer. You can write content, or review content created by others; or check for spelling or grammatical errors. No contribution is small. Every drop matters, that go on to form oceans. This section is for contributors who plan on taking part, in creating and maintaining our wiki & FAQ content. If you wish to work on technical side of things (Discord / GitHub automation and other cool stuff), then this document is probably not for you. ## Who are we? 🧠 Yes yes, you're thinking _well, duh, if I'm here I know who you are!_, but we do need to address the elephant in the room, and set clear ground-rules. We're a bunch of anonymous internet surfers who decided it's time retail investors have access to decent guide on all things investing. That's all. Why anonymous? Because we (well, some of us) value our privacy, and don't have any plans of creating a cult of persona around ourselves. We aren't registered with any regulatory body, like SEBI, or even AMFI. We don't represent any financial institution. In fact, you should assume, unless explicitly stated otherwise, none of us have any formal financial background. Most of the time, we hang out in [r/IndiaInvestments](https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaInvestments/), or its [Discord server](https://discord.gg/6FvYcma7Qz). If these all seem vague details, keep in mind that our hands aren't tied by business interests. This project is being built as a non-profit, open-source project; because we feel most for-profit businesses, would intentionally omit information that could be material to making financial decisions. Banks and insurance companies haven't exactly done a great job at educating the retailers in this process, and that's quite an understatement. Studies show Indian households have collectively lost 28B USD (read that right, not a typo) simply falling victim to financial mis-selling. Think of this project as a way to bridge this information asymmetry. There might be other documentations and guides out there for some financial guidance; but to the best of our knowledge, nothing exists with such lofty goals! ### How do I start? :rocket: - [Head over to our public task board](https://trello.com/b/NPlSa3C7/agile-sprint-board) Here, you'd fine some cards labeled as beginners (green tag). These are ripe for picking! Alternatively, find a column that has QA in its name. It's all the content that's undergoing review right now. If you've decided on how to contribute - reviewing existing content, or adding new content; head over to next section. - Find the owner of the card A card represents a unit of task. One of our core-team members would be tagged on that card, with display name / profile pic visible on it. This is the contact person for that card or the underlying task. If the card doesn't have any owner yet, no worries! Head over to our [Discord #discussions](https://discord.gg/6FvYcma7Qz) channel, and share the card you wish to work on. Someone there would guide you on what's required to complete that task, what has already been done etc. Once you've full context of all relevant work that has been done, or needs to be done; you'd be in a better position to contribute. If you plan on writing content, you can use any of the following tools for composing content: - MS Word - Google Doc - VSCode / Sublime Text / Atom editors with Markdown plugins - Notion - HackMD - Gitbook Use any of the above tools, as per your convenience, to create and share an early draft with us. Use the Discord channel mentioned above for sharing this. Owner of the card / task would take care of entering it into our repository, and you'd receive public credit for this work. It'd help if you could share your GItHub account with us (we highly recommend creating one, though it's not mandatory for this), because we plan of tagging you using all-contributors routine. Your first few contributions would have to be merged to our wiki following this process. When your content is being reviewed, you'd receive inline comments with suggestions to improve, or query on why you mentioned / didn't mention some particular aspect. If your contributions meet the bar, and you seem engaged enough; we'd send you an invite to join our team on Gitbook as a writer. Because we've limited space in our Gitbook org, we'd have to be picky about this. ## Advanced Contributors :sparkles: This section is not for every contributor. It's only for those whom we've invited to our Gitbook org as writer. We use Gitbook for our content management system (CMS). - Once you get invited as a writer, it's expected that you'd put in some effort to understand how to use the Gitbook editor, what to do in it, and more importantly - what not to do! Gitbook has fantastic documentation, that you can refer to, if you have any specific query along the lines of how to do X in Gitbook. We've made a small video that you can watch, to get a glimpse on how you can create and view content on our wiki, using Gitbook: {%youtube 7ASJsUbKVks%} You'd have to build an understanding around some of these: - Saving edits & merging - Merge conflict resolving - Rollback to earlier versions - Git & GitHub (only surface level understanding would do) - Markdown syntax - Pull requests Once you've gone through the above, you'd be ready to help other contributors, especially beginners, shipping their contributions 🎉🥳 ## Parting Thoughts 📚 Contributing to build a knowledge-base can be rewarding, often in unexpected ways. If nothing else, you get more clarity around your own understanding of some aspect of investing.