Contributing philosophy

Corda is an open source project with the aim of developing an enterprise-grade distributed ledger platform for business across a variety of industries. Corda was designed and developed to apply the concepts of blockchain and smart contract technologies to the requirements of modern business transactions. It is unique in its aim to build a platform for businesses to transact freely with any counter-party while retaining strict privacy. Corda provides an implementation of this vision in a code base which others are free to build on, contribute to or innovate around. The mission of Corda is further detailed in the Corda introductory white paper.

The project is supported and maintained by R3.

The Corda maintainers, developers and extended community make active use of the following channels:

  • The Corda Slack team for general community discussion, and in particular:>

    • The #contributing channel for discussions around contributing
    • The #design channel for discussions around the platform’s design
  • The corda-dev mailing list for discussion regarding Corda’s design and roadmap

  • The GitHub issues board for reporting platform bugs and potential enhancements

  • The Stack Overflow corda tag for specific technical questions

The project leaders appoint the project’s community maintainers, who are responsible for merging community contributions into the code base and acting as points of contact.

In addition to the project leader and community maintainer(s), developers employed by R3 who have passed our technical interview process have commit privileges to the repo. All R3 contributions undergo peer review, which is documented in public in GitHub, before they can be merged; they are held to the same standard as all other contributions. The community is encouraged both to observe and participate in this review process.

You can contact our community maintainers in the #contributing channel on the Corda Slack team.

Over two hundred individuals have contributed to the development of Corda. You can find a full list of contributors in the CONTRIBUTORS.md list.

The project is supported and maintained by R3. We develop in the open and publish our Jira to give everyone visibility. R3 also maintains and distributes a commercial distribution of Corda. Our vision is that distributions of Corda be compatible and interoperable, and our contribution and code review guidelines are designed in part to enable this.

As R3 is maintainer of the project and also develops a commercial distribution of Corda, what happens if a member of the community contributes a feature which the R3 team have implemented only in their commercial product? How is this apparent conflict managed? Our approach is simple: if the contribution meets the standards for the project (see above), then the existence of a competing commercial implementation will not be used as a reason to reject it. In other words, it is our policy that should a community feature be contributed which meets the criteria above, we will accept it or work with the contributor to merge/reconcile it with the commercial feature.

Was this page helpful?

Thanks for your feedback!

Chat with us

Chat with us on our #docs channel on slack. You can also join a lot of other slack channels there and have access to 1-on-1 communication with members of the R3 team and the online community.

Propose documentation improvements directly

Help us to improve the docs by contributing directly. It's simple - just fork this repository and raise a PR of your own - R3's Technical Writers will review it and apply the relevant suggestions.

We're sorry this page wasn't helpful. Let us know how we can make it better!

Chat with us

Chat with us on our #docs channel on slack. You can also join a lot of other slack channels there and have access to 1-on-1 communication with members of the R3 team and the online community.

Create an issue

Create a new GitHub issue in this repository - submit technical feedback, draw attention to a potential documentation bug, or share ideas for improvement and general feedback.

Propose documentation improvements directly

Help us to improve the docs by contributing directly. It's simple - just fork this repository and raise a PR of your own - R3's Technical Writers will review it and apply the relevant suggestions.