Maintaining as a GitHub open source project? about balanced-employee-ip-agreement

[mlinksva]

I think we can. https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement sets the bar very low (basically unmaintained). I suspect there won't be many contributions, but we can respond to pull requests and issues that do come in fairly promptly. Initially I'd be happy to triage such contributions, or someone else could.

There are some very lightweight guidelines now in CONTRIBUTING.md...

Contributions to this project are released to the public domain under CC0-1.0.

Contributors to this project must abide by our Code of Conduct.

Our README describes the project, its purpose, and caveats.

Your contributions are most welcome!

...and README.md:

BEIPA has started as a re-usable version of GitHub's employee IP agreement. Your company can use BEIPA too, and modify it as needed. If you'd like to help improve BEIPA for everyone, file an issue or make a pull request. While aiming to maintain the same "balanced" policy, we're keen to see feedback and suggestions for improving BEIPA. Tell us about:

• Legal issues with the agreement (e.g., how it works in different jurisdictions)
• Typo corrections
• Clearer wording
• Companies using the agreement
• Translations
• Other employee IP agreements that have been open sourced

Contributors to this project must abide by our Code of Conduct.

Contributors to this project are not your lawyers and nothing in this repository is legal advice. See extended disclaimer below.

These guidelines could work as-is, unless we have a longer term vision for the project that we want help executing. I think not having such a vision out of the gate is fine. We can see what the reaction is first. I suspect that a good long-term vision would require more up-front research before we open source.

If others use the agreement at all and want the world to know about it, one sort of regular contribution could be telling us about companies using the agreement. Contributor Covenant's adopter list (which most of its pull requests are additions to) is an example.

[mlinksva]

I'm pretty happy with CONTRIBUTING and README as they are. There might be suggestions from others as we take through process of open sourcing this repo but closing this for now.