How to get help and contribute

[scottconverse]

For questions use the Q&A category. For bugs open an Issue with OS, Docker version, error message, and reproduction steps.

Contributing: pull requests welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev environment, test suite, code standards, and PR guidance.

Test suite as of v1.2.0:

• 617 backend pytest (Docker-backed via docker compose run --rm --no-deps api python -m pytest tests -q)
• 36 frontend vitest (cd frontend && npm test -- --run)
• GitHub Actions CI on every push and PR; collected == passed cross-check catches silent skips; bootstrap-failure smoke job confirms the stack refuses to start with placeholder admin password

Earlier text in this thread mentioned "432 backend tests" — that was accurate at the time of writing; the number has grown with each tier. Run docker compose run --rm --no-deps api python -m pytest tests --collect-only -q locally for the authoritative current count.

Most needed contributions (open across tiers, unscheduled):

• State exemption rule coverage review. 175 state-scoped rules + 5 universal PII rules ship in backend/scripts/seed_rules.py, but city-specific statutory edge cases and phrasing vary. If your state has rules you'd expect to match and they don't, open a PR against that state's section.
• Accessibility testing. Real screen-reader / keyboard-only passes through the staff workbench. ring-[3px] focus, role="radiogroup" + roving tabindex, role="status" loading regions, dialog focus traps — lots of ground to re-verify against WCAG 2.2 AA.
• Additional connector types. SMB/NFS, SharePoint, Microsoft Graph. See discussion Additional connector types -- what does your city need? #11.
• Large-scale performance testing. 180k+ document corpora, >100-user liaison scenarios, ingestion throughput under disk pressure.
• Non-technical operator docs. The staff manual is sound; the admin-IT path still assumes comfort with Docker. A gentler walkthrough for a small-city-IT audience would help.
• Public portal hardening. T5D shipped a minimal three-surface public mode in v1.2.0. Rate limiting on POST /public/requests, CAPTCHA / bot protection, and state-by-state identity-verification hooks are all unscoped follow-on work.
• Key rotation for at-rest encryption. T6 / ENG-001 ships single-key Fernet encryption with a versioned envelope ({"v":1,"ct":"…"}) that leaves rotation as a clean future slice. MultiFernet / KMS integration are good candidates.

Release cadence: tags are cut manually, not on a schedule. Check the Releases page for the current shipped version.