How to contribute

The Fedora Data Working Group (FDWG) manages the data infrastrucuture of the Fedora Project - including message archiving, analytics, and data science tooling. This page explains how to get oriented, find work that suits you, and connect with the team.

Before You Start

If you haven’t already, go through the orientation materials in the FDWG orientation repository. They cover the group’s background, values, and working norms.

You’ll also need a Fedora Account System(FAS) account to participate in most FDWG infrastrucuture and to receive team communications via email.

Work Areas

FDWG has three main areas where contributors can get involved:

Hatlas

Hatlas is the group’s data platform - it provides shared infrastructure for data science work within the Fedora Project. If you’re interested in data engineering, platform operations, or helping analysts and scientists do their work more effectively, this is a good place to start.

Datanommer

Datanommer archives messages from the Fedora message bus. It’s a core piece of infrastructure for understanding what’s happening across the Fedora ecosystem. Datanommer is Fedora’s message bus archiver. It ingests every message and stores it in a database, and FDWG tooling exports that data as Parquet files for analysis. The project is split across several repositories:

datanommer-parquet-download — download Datanommer Parquet data
datanommer-mini — lightweight local instance
datanommer-docker — Docker setup
datanommer-dictionary — message schema knowledge capturers here work on message ingestion, storage, schema maintenance, and data quality.

Governance and Agreements

The fdwg-agreements repository holds the group’s working agreements — decisions about how we collaborate, make decisions, and handle access. Contributing here means helping shape how the group operates. This is a good entry point if you’re interested in open source governance or want to understand the group’s structure before diving into technical work.

Finding Something to Work On

Browse the open issues in the repositories above. Issues tagged good-first-issue or help-wanted are a good starting point for new contributors.

If you’re not sure where to fit in, introduce yourself on Matrix and describe what you’re interested in. The team can help point you toward current needs.

Contribution Workflow

FDWG projects are hosted on Fedora’s Forge instance. The general workflow is:

Fork the relevant repository.
Create a branch for your change.
Open a pull request and description what you’ve done and why.
A maintainer will review and merge, or suggest changes.

For larger changes or new features, it’s worth opening an issue or discussing on Matrix first to make sure the direction aligns with the team’s plans.

If you want to learn more about using Fedora Forge see Forge Documentation.

Documentation

This documentation is written in AsciiDoc and published via Antora to docs.fedoraproject.org.

The source is in the fdwg/docs repository. If you spot something missing, unclear, or out of date, contributions to the docs are very welcome - open a pull request the same way you would for any other FDWG project.

Contact

The primary channel for FDWG discussion is Matrix. Join the FDWG room to ask questions, introduce yourself, or follow ongoing work.

For private matters, the team can be reached via FAS-registered email addresses.

If you’re not sure who to contact about something specific, ask in the Matrix room - someone will point you in the right direction.

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