Open Aquarium Project

Get involved

The drafts need people who keep tanks and people who build equipment. All the work happens in the open, in one repository.

Start here.

Three ways to help. All you need is a GitHub account.

  • Read a draft, and open an issue

    Pick the specification closest to your tank or your product, and say what is wrong, unclear, or missing. Open an issue

  • Try the Data Model with your tank’s data

    Describe your system, equipment, and test results, and report what doesn’t fit. Read the Data ModelPDF

  • Build something that reads or writes it

    An importer, an app, a firmware port, a module. Every working implementation tests the drafts.

Ways to contribute.

  • Discuss

    Open an issue. Label it discussion for questions, proposal for ideas that need discussion before anything is written, or spec-change for a specific change, plus the specification’s own label.

  • Propose

    For a new specification, a new reference design, or a large change, write a proposal from the template.

  • Change a specification

    Open a pull request against the specification. Link the issue it resolves, and add a row to its revision history.

  • Implement

    Build something that reads, writes, or speaks a specification, and tell us how it went. No specification is approved without independent implementations.

How decisions are made.

By consensus, in public. No single person or organization may dominate a specification, and that includes the project’s founder.

A Maintainer determines consensus in good faith and records the evidence in the issue or pull request. Anyone can appeal a decision by opening an issue.

Before a specification is approved:

  • it addresses all five principles;
  • a public review of at least 30 days has been announced and completed;
  • at least two independent implementations work together, one of them from an organization not among its authors;
  • its conformance materials, such as schemas, test vectors, or test procedures, are published; and
  • its approval checklist is complete.

Read the governance 

Licenses that let anyone build products, and sign-offs that keep it that way.

MaterialLicense
Specifications and proposalsCommunity Specification License 1.0, with royalty-free patent commitments
Code, schemas, and data filesApache License 2.0
Hardware designsCERN Open Hardware Licence v2, Weakly Reciprocal
Project documentsCreative Commons Attribution 4.0

Contributing to a specification or a proposal means agreeing to the Community Specification Contributor License Agreement 1.0. Every commit is signed off under the Developer Certificate of Origin, with git commit -s.

Read the contributing guide 

Everyone is welcome.

Everyone taking part agrees to the Code of Conduct, in every space where the project meets.

Open an issue Code of Conduct