Contributing to Neon Law Navigator

Five ways to contribute

Pick the path that fits the time and craft you have:

1. Improve the product repository (authorized lawyer).
2. Add a fillable government PDF.
3. Tell the team what you learned.
4. Join a workshop or presentation.
5. Use Neon Law Navigator and report what breaks.

Contribute to the product repository

The whole stack is written in Rust in one private monorepo, licensed BUSL-1.1. Outside pull requests are closed; authorized lawyers contribute inside the firm. 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.

• Maintain a brand catalog. Each public brand keeps its English home and services copy in neon/locales/en/<brand-key>; the registered catalogs are neon/, delete-your-data/, and lawyer-shook/. A new catalog must be added through the brand registry with covering tests and attorney review for public legal copy.

View content images locally

The repository deliberately leaves published blog, presentation, and workshop image bytes out of Git. Before running the site locally, hydrate the images referenced by the content tree from the public asset route:

cargo run -p cli -- ops assets fetch-referenced \
  --base-url https://www.neonlaw.com/assets
cargo run -p neon

This is a read-only HTTP download and needs neither Google Application Default Credentials nor access to the production bucket. The bucket stays private: the running application reads only its marketing assets with its own workload identity and publishes those bytes at /assets/*. Re-run the command when a post gains or changes an image; the files land in the ignored server/public/img/ tree and are served locally from /public.

Publish presentation images

Save each finished PNG or JPEG under server/public/img/<deck-slug>/ and reference it as img/<deck-slug>/<filename> in the presentation. Run these commands from the Navigator repository root:

navigator ops assets upload --dir server/public/img --bucket neon-law-stg-assets
navigator ops assets verify --base-url https://staging.neonlaw.com/assets

Publish to staging first. Each deployment has its own assets bucket.

Ship through GitOps

Every change travels through a pull request to main. The required checks and resolved review threads protect the branch; auto-merge lands one squash commit, then the release and deployment flow begins from that reviewed tip.

Work with the store

SurrealDB holds every table. dev up writes its whole connection contract into .devx/env, and nothing defaults: a process that is not configured fails loudly instead of quietly connecting to the wrong store.

• Connection: NAVIGATOR_SURREAL_ENDPOINT, _NAMESPACE, _DATABASE.
• Schema: one idempotent DEFINE file, applied whole on every boot.
• Tests: an embedded engine per test — no container, no port, nothing to reclaim.

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 lawyer_review before the filled packet can be signed or filed.

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.

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.