## About

For the official, latest release of the IEEE Open Source Maintainers Manual, please see
<https://opensource.ieee.org/community/manual>. 

This open source project is for the development of the IEEE Open Source Maintainers Manual, and
contains a mix of old, new, and proposed recommendations, and other assetts and recommendations that may or
may not make their way into the official IEEE Open Source Maintainer's Manual. 

The purpose of this project is to provide both a useful and functional set of resources, 
templates, and guides, as well as unambiguous clarity on our expectations of all
users of the IEEE Open Source Platform. 

## Releases (VERSION.md)

Please see the [VERSION.md] file for a list of all official and unnoficial releases 
of this open source project. Releases associated with a new official version of the IEEE Open Source Maintainers Manual are clearly indicated. 

## All accounts on the IEEE Open Source Platform are maintainers

Some peole wonder why when they sign into the IEEE Open Source Platform for the
first time they are asked to agree to follow the requirements set forth in
the IEEE Open Source Maintainers Manual. The reason is simple. All user accounts
on the IEEE Open Source Platform have the ability to create (or fork) projects,
for which they become project owners and maintainers. 



On this platofrm, the owners and maintainers have the ability to accept contributions that are
submitted to a project, and have the ability to set various settings and
configurations to a project and it's associated resources (repository, issues, 
merge requests, CI/CD, wiki, snippets, etc), as well as some user and group 
level access control. 


A contributor will generally have more limited control of a project's 
configuration 
project, as well as to make changes to various configurations and to set
some access control permissions. 
(i.e., modifications or additions to the material of a project), 

While a contributor is a person who submits some modification or addition to a
project. 
material of some open source project, a 
and potentially, contributors. 
All users of the IEEE Open Source Platform are granted the ability to create or
fork projects, all users have teh ability to be maintainers and contributors
on the platform. 



Contributors must have a valid [CLA](https://opensource.ieee.org/community/cla/apache) number from the IEEE.