Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Iran Transition Project.
Read GOVERNANCE.md first. This project has a strict mission constraint:
rigorous, impartial, publicly available analysis. Contributions that introduce
factional alignment, political advocacy, or unsupported claims will not be merged
regardless of their other merits.
All contributors must sign the CLA before any pull request is merged.
This is not negotiable and is not bureaucratic friction — it exists to preserve the project's ability to offer alternative licensing to policy institutions and governments that cannot accept copyleft terms, while keeping the public license open for everyone else.
What the CLA does:
- Grants the project the right to sublicense your contribution
- Does NOT transfer your copyright — you retain full ownership of your work
- Applies to all future contributions once signed
How to sign: The CLA bot will prompt you automatically when you open your first pull request. Sign electronically in that flow. It takes under a minute.
If you have questions about the CLA before contributing, contact: admin@irantransitionproject.org
Contributions must adhere to the project's epistemic framework:
Tagging requirements:
[Fact]— directly verifiable, multi-source[Inference]— reasoned from facts, logic stated[Uncertain]— single source, contested, or extrapolated[Speculation]— acknowledged hypothesis
Source standards:
- Primary sources preferred over secondary
- Iranian state media cited for claims only, not treated as factual
- Diaspora sources tagged
[DIASPORA SOURCE]and cross-checked - All sources logged in the module's source log
Factional neutrality: The test for any claim is: what must be true regardless of who governs? Analysis that depends on a preferred faction winning is not neutral analysis.
- Persian-language source integration and translation
- Subject matter review (political science, security studies, economics, law)
- Methodological critique — where the framework is wrong, say so explicitly
- Historical case study analysis relevant to transition dynamics
- Verification of existing citations and confidence bandings
- Advocacy content for any political faction or opposition group
- Policy recommendations tied to specific foreign government positions
- Content that cannot be sourced or tagged per the epistemic framework above
- Fork the repo
- Make changes in a feature branch
- Sign the CLA when prompted
- Submit a pull request with a clear description of what changed and why
- Reference any sources added in the PR description
Expect review feedback focused on analytical standards, not political agreement.
This project uses Claude (Anthropic) as a research and maintenance tool. Two instruction files govern its behavior:
CLAUDE_CHAT_INSTRUCTIONS.md— analytical session protocol (epistemic tagging, source standards, factional neutrality)CLAUDE_CODE_INSTRUCTIONS.md— repository maintenance protocol (YAML operations, validation, build pipeline)
AI-generated analytical content is subject to the same epistemic standards as human contributions: sourced, tagged, and factionally neutral. "AI-assisted" means the tool accelerates research and drafting — it does not mean claims are accepted without verification.
Contributors are welcome to review and critique the instruction files themselves. If the AI protocol introduces bias or methodological weakness, that is a valid and important contribution to flag.