# Contributing to Neon Law Navigator ## Intro ### Five ways to contribute Pick the path that fits the time and craft you have: 1. Improve the product repository (authorized staff). 2. Add a fillable government PDF. 3. Tell the team what you learned. 4. Join a show-and-tell or presentation. 5. Use Neon Law Navigator and report what breaks. --- Neon Law Navigator is proprietary technology of Litbox, Inc. Fiat Law and Neon Law operate it under perpetual licenses. This workshop is about contributing to the **product**: issues, templates, government PDF forms, tests, and the shared corpus that authorized installations use. Code improvements assign to Litbox and license back under those perpetual grants. The mission — putting the rights already written into law within reach of the people they belong to — only moves if that corpus keeps getting better. There are five ways to contribute; pick the one that fits the time you have. ## Improve the Corpus ### Contribute to the product repository The whole stack is written in Rust in a private monorepo. Authorized staff open issues and pull requests. The most useful corpus contributions are specific ones: - Add a missing legal template. Add a government PDF form. Improve a field map. Add a test that locks a workflow to the law it implements. --- Everything you have seen in these workshops — the `web` app, the `navigator` CLI, the durable workflows — lives in one private monorepo authorized staff can read and run. Start by standing it up yourself with the [Operating Neon Law Navigator](/foundation/nebula/workshops/deploy-the-navigator) workshop or the local KIND loop, then file what you find. The Foundation welcomes issues today and pull requests in the near future; every contribution is covered by the [Contributor License and Feedback Agreement](https://github.com/neon-law-foundation/navigator/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) in the repository root, which assigns code contributions to Litbox and licenses them back under the perpetual operator grants — read it before you send a line. **Scope is not the gate — the local KIND loop is.** A contribution may be as ambitious as the problem demands: a sweeping refactor, a new service beside the existing ones, even replacing a subsystem. What every change must do is run inside the local KIND cluster that `cargo run --release -p cli -- dev up` stands up — the loop that already runs Postgres, Keycloak, Garage, OPA, Restate, and Grafana on one machine with nothing but Docker. A change that introduces a new dependency wires it into that loop in the same pull request, with a KIND manifest beside the existing ones, so the whole stack still comes up locally. That rule is what keeps production portable and contribution open. In production, persistent state lives on managed services — Cloud SQL for Postgres, Cloud Storage for documents — and each one has a cloud-agnostic stand-in inside KIND, so the topology you test locally is the topology a firm deploys. And because the full stack runs on a laptop, you never need a cloud account or someone else's cloud bill to verify your work: clone the repository, run `dev up`, prove the change against the running stack, and open the pull request. ### Add a fillable government PDF Government forms are one of the best places to contribute because the path is concrete. A form-backed template lives under `templates/forms/...`, names the official `origin_url`, asks its intake questions from the shared question bank in `store/seeds/Question.yaml`, and maps answers onto the PDF's AcroForm fields through either a `.fields` manifest or a `.fields.toml` map. The workflow still passes through `staff_review` before the filled packet can be signed or filed. --- The Nevada LLC formation packet is the model to study. Its template, `templates/forms/united_states/nevada/state/nv__llc_formation.md`, asks canonical states like `person__client`, `entity__company`, `person__registered_agent`, `custom_single_choice__management_structure`, and `people__managing_members`. Its re-authored field layer, `templates/forms/united_states/nevada/state/nv__llc_formation.fields`, uses those same state paths as PDF field names. That is the contract: the common question bank gives the questionnaire a stable vocabulary, the PDF layer uses that vocabulary, and `forms/tests/question_code_contract.rs` fails if the two drift. When you add a form, start from the real issuing-authority blank, run `navigator forms fields ` to read the field names off the exact bytes, map only the fields the questionnaire can answer, and leave payment-card or staff-only acceptance fields unmapped. Then run the form tests before you open the issue or PR: ```bash cargo test -p forms cargo run -p cli -- validate templates ``` ## Share What You Learn ### Tell us what you learned The most valuable thing you can send is what you learned using it: a template that worked, a checklist item we are missing, a bug, a kaizen improvement — never a client's data, just the craft. Email [support@neonlaw.org](mailto:support@neonlaw.org?subject=Navigator+feedback). --- You do not need a GitHub account or a single line of code to make Neon Law Navigator better. The [Using Neon Law Navigator](/foundation/nebula/workshops/use-the-navigator) workshop closes by asking you to send the markdown of the template you built and the one kaizen improvement you found — that is this contribution. Every template a lawyer shares raises the floor of competence for the next lawyer who joins. Feedback is covered by the same Contributor License and Feedback Agreement as code — sharing grants the Foundation a license to use it, so [read the agreement](https://github.com/neon-law-foundation/navigator/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) before you send. ### Join a show-and-tell The Foundation runs public Nebula show-and-tells around the country — come watch a real matter built end to end, ask questions, and meet others doing this work. See the [schedule](/foundation/nebula/show-and-tell). --- A show-and-tell is the live version of the [Using the Navigator Workshop](/foundation/nebula/workshops/use-the-navigator) workshop: an hour where we build a notation in front of you and answer whatever you bring. They are free, and you register from the event page. Showing up — asking a hard question, telling us what your practice needs — is a contribution, because it points the next release at the work that matters. Find the city and date nearest you on the [show-and-tell schedule](/foundation/nebula/show-and-tell). ### Join a presentation We give talks on how and why we build this. [Rust in Peace](/foundation/nebula/presentations/rust-in-peace), our Rust NYC talk, dissects deterministic legal workflows — and every code slide is an exact copy of the shipped repository. --- Presentations go a layer deeper than a show-and-tell: the engineering and the argument behind it. [Rust in Peace](/foundation/nebula/presentations/rust-in-peace) walks the path from statute to Cucumber feature to template to notation, one attorney-gated step at a time, with a build test that fails if any slide drifts from the real source. More talks are on the way. Come to one, push back on the design, and tell us where it breaks — that pressure is how the architecture earns its keep. ## Put It to Work ### Use Neon Law Navigator The simplest contribution is to use it. Every matter you run and every instance you stand up surfaces the next improvement. Start with [Using](/foundation/nebula/workshops/use-the-navigator); run your own with [Operating](/foundation/nebula/workshops/deploy-the-navigator). --- Using the platform is not a lesser contribution — it is the one that generates all the others. A lawyer who runs a real matter in [Using the Navigator Workshop](/foundation/nebula/workshops/use-the-navigator) finds the missing checklist item; an operator who stands up an instance in [Operating Neon Law Navigator](/foundation/nebula/workshops/deploy-the-navigator) finds the rough edge in the install. If you would rather the Foundation install it and train your whole team, [Nimbus](/foundation/nimbus) does exactly that. Whichever road you take, what you learn flows back through the four contributions above. ## Wrap Up ### Why this matters A corpus the whole community improves is how routine legal work gets cheap enough to reach the people priced out of it today. --- Neon Law Navigator is licensed so that no one has to ask permission to run it, and built in the open so that every fix and every template compounds for the next clinic and the next small firm. That is the access-to-justice fight, and contributing — in any of these five ways — is how you join it. Read the [Foundation mission](/foundation/mission) for why it matters.