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Initiative Labs
Contribute

Contribute

There are two separate things you might want to do: contribute to a project's code, or add to the lab notebook. They work differently, since project code and this website live in separate repositories.

Fork a project

Every project on this site links out to its own repository — that's the "View repository" button on its detail page. Contributing to a project means forking and opening a pull request there, against that project's own repo, not this website's.

  1. 1. Open the project's page and follow "View repository" to its GitHub repo.
  2. 2. Fork it, make your changes on a branch, and open a pull request against that repo.
  3. 3. If you're picking up a Shelved or Archived project, say so in your PR description — the status shown here isn't automatic, so it only changes once this site's content is updated to match.

Add a notebook entry

Lab notebook entries are markdown files with frontmatter, committed straight to this website's own repository — the same "add a markdown file" model the whole site runs on.

  1. 1. Fork this website's repository.
  2. 2. Add a new file under content/notebook/.
  3. 3. Give it frontmatter with title, date (ISO format, YYYY-MM-DD — entries sort on this string directly), projectTag (must exactly match an existing project's slug, or the entry won't show a linked project), and slug:
---
title: "Entry title"
date: "2026-08-27"
projectTag: "road-logger"
slug: "entry-title"
---

Entry body goes here, in Markdown.
  1. 4. Write the entry body underneath in plain markdown — headings, lists, and paragraphs all render. Rough, in-progress notes are the point; it doesn't need to read like a finished write-up. If you use headings, start at ## rather than # — the entry title above is already the page's top-level heading.
  2. 5. Open a pull request.