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Every project is unique but there is often a similar organizational structure. Understanding of terms and roles will help you get quickly oriented to any new project.

A typical open source project has the following types of people:

• Author: The person/s or organization that created the project
• Owner: The person/s who has administrative ownership over the organization or repository (not always the same as the original author)
• Maintainers: Contributors who are responsible for driving the vision and managing the organizational aspects of the project (They may also be authors or owners of the project.)
• Contributors: Everyone who has contributed something back to the project
• Community Members: People who use the project. They might be active in conversations or express their opinion on the project’s direction

Bigger projects may also have subcommittees or working groups focused on different tasks, such as tooling, triage, community moderation, and event organizing. Look on a project’s website for a “team” page, or in the repository for governance documentation, to find this information.

A project also has documentation. These files are usually listed in the top level of a repository.

• LICENSE: By definition, every open source project must have an open source license. If the project does not have a license, it is not open source.
• README: The README is the instruction manual that welcomes new community members to the project. It explains why the project is useful and how to get started.
• CONTRIBUTING: Whereas READMEs help people use the project, contributing docs help people contribute to the project. It explains what types of contributions are needed and how the process works. While not every project has a CONTRIBUTING file, its presence signals that this is a welcoming project to contribute to.
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT: The code of conduct sets ground rules for participants’ behavior associated and helps to facilitate a friendly, welcoming environment. While not every project has a CODE_OF_CONDUCT file, its presence signals that this is a welcoming project to contribute to.
• Other documentation: There might be additional documentation, such as tutorials, walkthroughs, or governance policies, especially on bigger projects.

Finally, open source projects use the following tools to organize discussion. Reading through the archives will give you a good picture of how the community thinks and works.

• Issue tracker: Where people discuss issues related to the project.
• Pull requests: Where people discuss and review changes that are in progress.
• Discussion forums or mailing lists: Some projects may use these channels for conversational topics (for example, “How do I…“ or “What do you think about…“ instead of bug reports or feature requests). Others use the issue tracker for all conversations.
• Synchronous chat channel: Some projects use chat channels (such as Slack or IRC) for casual conversation, collaboration, and quick exchanges.