Ansel is not a hobby project: people depend on it to get their work done. This section is the project’s constitution — who it serves, what it promises, what it expects, and how decisions are made. It exists so that nobody has to guess, and so that every decision can be challenged against a written rule instead of a mood.
Read in this order:
- The pact — what the project owes its users, what it asks of them, and what contributors owe and receive. The mutual engagements everything else derives from.
- Scope — what Ansel is, who it is for, and what it refuses to become. The yardstick against which every request is measured.
- Code of conduct — how we treat each other, what gets moderated, how to appeal.
- A culture of problem solving — how to state a problem so it can be solved.
- Reporting bugs — the practical protocol, and what happens to your report.
- Designing Ansel — how a problem becomes a feature: the four-stage design protocol.
Then the reference and practical guides: the nominal workflows, project organization, triaging issues, coding style, documenting, translating, contributing training data, and the website.
Whether you design, code, triage, test, document, translate or help other users: all of it is contribution, and the unglamorous kinds — testing, triaging, documenting, answering — are the ones this project runs on.