Contributing to Source Engineering

Source Engineering is an open engineering discipline. Contributions are welcome from anyone willing to engage with the discipline's change process.

Where to start

Read the foundational essays. They establish the intellectual direction.
Read the organisation profile. The five-layer reference architecture is the visual centrepiece of the discipline.
Identify the authoritative repository for the artefact you want to change. Each repository has one authoritative responsibility.

Source Engineering distinguishes three classes of change.

Routine changes -- bug fixes, documentation, refactors that do not alter the discipline's contracts. Open a pull request against the authoritative repository. The standard PR flow is sufficient.
Specification and architecture changes -- any change that affects a normative contract, the reference architecture, the COTS spec, or the four-layer stack. File an RFC first. Use the RFC proposal issue template. The RFC is reviewed in the authoritative repository and, once accepted, graduates to a release-candidate.
Foundational changes -- changes to the discipline's pillars, principles, scope, or non-goals. File an RFC and route it through the governance repository. Foundational changes require a two-week review window.

All contributions must honour the discipline's cardinal rules.

No en-dashes (U+2013) or em-dashes (U+2014) in any committed file. Use ASCII hyphens.
No triple-semicolons (;;;) in prose. The ;; divider is preserved.
Authored by the discipline owner. No agent identity in any committed surface.
No AGENT-DOCTRINE.md or per-repo doctrine file.
No creation-decision narratives in committed files. Repo READMEs describe the artefact, not the decision to create the repo.

The discipline's conformance suite is the standard. Implementations and tests evolve against versioned specifications.
All PRs are reviewed against the discipline's quality gate.
Proposed work uses the research-proposal or draft-spec label. Accepted work moves to release-candidate, then stable. Deprecated work uses the deprecated label.

GitHub Issues -- bug reports, RFCs, pillar critiques, and discussions.
Discord -- the discipline's Discord channel tracks work via Kanban board 13.
GitHub Project -- the discipline's roadmap lives at https://github.com/orgs/Source-Engineering/projects/1.

The discipline follows the source-engineering-governance code of conduct. See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.