Contributing philosophy

Mission

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 the R3 Alliance, or R3 for short, which consists of over two hundred firms working together to build and maintain this open source enterprise-grade blockchain platform.

Community Locations

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

Project Leadership and Maintainers

The leader of this project is currently Mike Hearn, who is also the Lead Platform Engineer at R3. The project leader appoints 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.

Community maintainers

Current community maintainers:

  • Joel Dudley - Contact me:

    • On the Corda Slack team, either in the #community channel or by direct message using the handle @joel
    • By email: joel.dudley at r3.com

We anticipate additional maintainers joining the project in the future from across the community.

Existing Contributors

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

Transparency and Conflict Policy

The project is supported and maintained by the R3 Alliance, which consists of over two hundred firms working together to build and maintain this open source enterprise-grade blockchain platform. 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 the R3 Alliance 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.