Community Guidelines

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+# Contributing to KerrGeoPy
+
+Contributions are welcome and greatly appreciated! There are many different ways to contribute including writing tutorials, improving the documentation, submitting bug reports and suggesting or implementing new features.
+
+## Types of Contributions
+
+### Bug Reports and Feature Requests
+
+If you identify a bug or have an idea for a new feature, open an issue at https://github.com/BlackHolePerturbationToolkit/KerrGeoPy/issues. 
+For bug reports, please also include your operating system/processor architecture and any relevant information about your python environment.
+
+### Documentation
+
+Improvements to the documentation are always welcome. Documentation for KerrGeoPy is generated from python docstrings using [Sphinx](https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/index.html) and hosted on [ReadTheDocs](https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/). Docstrings should follow the [numpydoc](https://sphinxcontrib-napoleon.readthedocs.io/en/latest/example_numpy.html) format. The tutorial pages are generated from the Jupyter notebooks in https://github.com/BlackHolePerturbationToolkit/KerrGeoPy/tree/main/docs/source/notebooks using [MyST-NB](https://myst-nb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).
+
+
+### Contributing Code
+
+To contribute code, follow the steps below to submit a pull request. See https://bhptoolkit.org/conventions.html for a list of naming conventions used throughout the package.
+Ideally, any new features should also come with unit tests and documentation. See https://github.com/BlackHolePerturbationToolkit/KerrGeoPy/tree/main/tests for more information about testing.
+
+## Getting Started
+
+First, fork/clone the repository and create a new branch. After implementing changes, verify that all unit tests pass.
+
+```bash
+python -m unittest
+```
+
+To preview any changes to the documentation, build the docs
+
+```bash
+cd docs
+make html
+```
+
+Finally, push the changes and submit a pull request through Github.
+
+## Community
+
+KerrGeoPy is a part of the [Black Hole Perturbation Toolkit](https://bhptoolkit.org/index.html). See the [Users and Contributors](https://bhptoolkit.org/users.html) page for more information.

README.md

@@ -25,6 +25,10 @@ pip install kerrgeopy
 >
 > This library uses functions introduced in scipy 1.8, so it may also be necessary to update scipy by running `pip install scipy -U`, although in most cases this should be done automatically by pip. Certain plotting and animation functions also make use of features introduced in matplotlib 3.7 and rely on [ffmpeg](https://ffmpeg.org/download.html), which can be easily installed using [homebrew](https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/ffmpeg) or [anaconda](https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/ffmpeg).
 
+## Contributing
+
+For contribution guidelines, see [CONTRIBUTING](https://github.com/BlackHolePerturbationToolkit/KerrGeoPy/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md).
+
 ## Stable Bound Orbits
 
 KerrGeoPy computes orbits in Boyer-Lindquist coordinates $(t,r,\theta,\phi)$. Let $M$ to represent the mass of the primary body and let $J$ represent its angular momentum. Working in geometrized units where $G=c=1$, stable bound orbits are parametrized using the following variables: