7.3 Contributor Guidelines

NXT’s open-source playbook is designed to welcome first-time contributors while maintaining the high standards required for a compliance-aware protocol. The project’s GitHub organisation is divided into repositories by domain—core-contracts, frontend, docs, legal-templates, and dev-ops. Each repo has a CONTRIBUTING.md that outlines environment setup, coding conventions, and review expectations. To lower onboarding friction, a dedicated “first-issue” label identifies tasks suitable for beginners, each accompanied by a screenshot, steps-to-reproduce (for bug fixes), or acceptance criteria (for documentation tweaks).

Every pull request (PR) must fill out a template with four mandatory sections: Problem Statement, Solution Overview, Testing Strategy, and Risk Assessment. For code changes, automated test coverage is enforced via continuous-integration gates; a PR fails if line- or branch-coverage drops below threshold. For documentation edits, a link to relevant regulation or forum thread is required, ensuring that factual claims have traceable sources. Significant architectural overhauls—like adding a new compliance oracle—cannot merge directly. Instead, the author creates an NXT Improvement Proposal (NXT-IP), a Markdown file housed in the governance-proposals repo. The NXT-IP must articulate motivation, backward-compatibility considerations, security implications, and a phased implementation timeline. A minimum seven-day public comment period allows stakeholders—from auditors to UI designers—to weigh in before a governance snapshot schedules an on-chain vote.

Mentorship is formalised through a “buddy system.” First-time contributors are paired with experienced maintainers who provide guidance on repository structure, coding standards, and review etiquette. This pairing lasts until two successful PRs merge, after which the newcomer can volunteer as a buddy, creating a virtuous cycle of knowledge transfer. A quarterly “Contributor Forum” livestream reviews merged features, highlights roadblocks, and awards digital badges—Bronze, Silver, Gold—based on measurable impact metrics such as lines of code merged, docs translated, or security issues identified.

Intellectual-property clarity is critical in a compliance context. All code contributions default to the MIT licence, while documentation uses Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Contributors must sign a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) via a commit signature, asserting that they have the right to submit the work and that it does not infringe third-party rights. For legal-template additions, a separate sign-off from licensed counsel is required, and the template is stored in a versioned folder with jurisdiction tags, facilitating downstream audits.

Through rigorous templates, mentorship pipelines, and transparent licensing, the Contributor Guidelines transform open collaboration from a nebulous invitation into a structured pathway where every participant knows how to add value and how that value is measured, reviewed, and protected.