Contributing

OpenPronoun is a draft, and it improves with every perspective it hears. Engineers, designers, linguists, clinicians, and anyone who has been misnamed by software are all welcome here.

Report a pronoun that didn’t parse

If your pronouns didn’t parse or display the way they should, that’s a gap in the lexicon, not a problem with you. Open an issue with:

• what you typed, exactly as you’d type it in a form;
• what you expected to see (for example the five forms, or how it should display);
• anything about context or usage that matters, if you’re comfortable sharing it.

You don’t need to know the data model or write any code to help this way.

Suggest a change to the spec

Ambiguities, missing cases, internationalization gaps, and UX guidance are all fair game. Open an issue to discuss, or edit the page directly: every docs page has an Edit page link at the bottom, and the source lives in docs/src/content/docs.

Normative changes (anything on the Conformance page, or rules it references) should explain the case they fix and how existing implementations are affected.

Contribute code

The repository is an npm workspaces monorepo built with Turborepo and versioned with Changesets. It needs Node 24 or newer.

npm install            # install root + all workspaces
npm run build          # build packages, then docs
npm run test           # run tests
npm run lint           # lint
npm run typecheck      # type-check
npm run check:exports  # verify package exports (publint + attw)
npm run format         # format with Prettier

Changes to a published package need a changeset, which CI checks on pull requests:

npm run changeset

New parsing or formatting behavior should come with fixtures in @openpronoun/conformance, so ports in other languages pick up the same expectations.

Work on these docs

The site is built with Astro and Starlight and deploys to GitHub Pages.

npm run docs:dev       # local dev server
npm run docs:build     # production build
npm run docs:preview   # preview the production build

The explainer animations on the home page live in docs/public/media/ and are shared with the repository README.