First off all, thank you so much considering making a contribution to this effort! We gratefully accept issue submissions and pull requests (PRs) from community members to help support this work; in fact, there is no way we can succeed in this effort without building a community to support it!
What follows is a set of guidelines for conributing to this repository. This is a living document, and we hope you will feel free to propose alterations to this guidance just like everything else in this repository.
Before contributing to this repository, please read this welcome post, and introduce yourself if you'd like to. If you plan to contribute in ways other than discussion, please be sure to check if other existing or ongoing work is related to what you will do, and communicate your intentions to work on something (prior to doing all the hard work!) if it is a time consuming effort, via discussion or issues. This helps ensure community members don't waste their precious time duplicating each other's work, or working on something that might not have community support.
Anyting you can do to help further the goals of this work (see README.md for more details on what those goals are) is welcome
and sincerely appreciated. Below are a few ideas for what this might look like, to get you started.
If you have ideas for ways to improve the documentation or organizaton of this repository, feel free to implement them and submit a PR.
See a typo? Think the phrasing in this document is convoluted, or unclear? Think the directories housing the transparency data should be reorganized to make the structure more natural? Feel free to submit a PR with alterations making improvements.
If you notice issues with any aspects of this project, but don't have the time, interest or tools necessary to implement fixes, you can submit an issue letting other members of the community know. Issues are incredibly valuable for improving this project.
Transparency data is the lifeblood of this project. Contributing insurer or hospital transparency data in any of the categories outlined in README.md is a great way to help amplify the utility of this project.
Coming Soon We plan to release a guide for collecting and submitting each type of transparency data to help facilitate contributions. Keep an eye out here for updates, and in the meantime reach out if you'd like to sumbmit data and need help with doing so or clarification.
If you have ideas about any aspects of this project, even if you don't necessarily have the time, interest or tools necessary to implement those ideas, we'd love to hear about them. You can start or join a discussion in the github Discussions tab to tell everyone about your idea and start a conversation.
Building a vibrant, welcoming and supportive community is crucial to the success of this crowdsourced effort. Plus, it's just a generally nice thing to be a part of. Anything you can do to help support and welcome all people to contribute and paricipate here is incredbiy valuable, and will be greatly appreciated by all. This can include things like answering other's questions in discussions, giving your constructive feedback on issues or pull requests made by others, and spreading the word about the existence of this work to anyone you think could benefit from it, or would be interested in being part of it.