<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in" align="CENTER"><b>Project
Submission Guidelines</b></p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">At Handmade Network, we
pride ourselves on being open to hosting all sorts of projects, from
low level tools to games to conscientious web applications to
innumerable other carefully crafted varieties of software. With this
in mind, there are certain standards of content quality that we
expect projects hosted on the site to meet, and certain
characteristics that we believe projects should uphold in order to
best contribute to the community of software development we are
attempting to cultivate. 
</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">This document outlines
these standards and characteristics as specifically as possible,
allowing for exceptions both in favor and against project approval if
unanticipated circumstances arise. All project approvals or
rejections will be accompanied by a justification, and we expect to
be held accountable if the provided justification is insufficiently
backed by these guidelines.</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Content Quality</b></p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">A
high-quality Handmade Network project submission will:</p>
<ol>
	<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Have a relevant
	and informative blurb</b><span style="font-weight: normal"> which
	gives those browsing project listings a basic idea of the project's
	purpose and value. The 'elevator pitch', if you will.</span></p>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Have a thorough
	description</b><span style="font-weight: normal">, which will give
	visitors several vital pieces of information in understanding the
	project:</span></p>
	<ol type="i">
		<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">
		The background / impetus for the project’s creation</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">
		The project's short-term and long-term goals</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">
		The current status of the project</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><span style="font-weight: normal">The
		road-map to reaching these goals, both short- and long-term</span></p>
	</li></ol>
</li></ol>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">	Excellent
descriptions will also make use of (BBCode) markup to make it 	easier
for readers to scan for relevant information.</p>
<ol start="3">
	<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Provide links
	to other relevant websites</b> where visitors may find out more
	about project development or the current activity of the author(s).
	Common examples:</p>
	<ol type="i">
		<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">A YouTube channel
		where the author(s) showcase latest features or record development
		logs</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">An external
		project homepage where new development builds can be found</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">An external
		source-code hosting site where the project's source code is
		available</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">A social media
		page for the project or the author(s) showing development progress</p>
	</li></ol>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">P<b>rovide several
	screenshots showcasing the current state of  project development</b>,
	if the project is visually oriented. Examples:</p>
	<ol type="i">
		<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">A project with a
		graphical user interface should show what a typical user will see
		when interacting with the running program</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">Same goes for
		command line tool with a curses-like TUI</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">A game or game
		engine should provide several screenshots to give visitors an idea
		of what makes it unique</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">Visually-oriented
		projects with support for multiple platforms should provide at
		least one screenshot of the project running on each platform</p>
	</li></ol>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Where possible,
	provide current builds of the project</b> that visitors can run to
	see the state of the project.</p>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Customize the
	project page with appropriate colors or background images</b> to
	give the project a sense of visual identity.</p>
</li></ol>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in">Providing as much
information about your project as possible will help us decide
whether it meets the qualifications listed below, and whether
community members will be invested in your project's success.</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Acceptable Projects</b></p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">For
us to be willing to approve a project on the site, it should:</p>
<ol>
	<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Be a
	legitimate, unique, and original work.</b><span style="font-weight: normal">
	We unequivocally will not accept projects which are blatantly
	advertisements for unrelated websites or companies, projects which
	are indistinguishable from others on the site, projects which are
	incorrectly attributed to someone other than the actual creator. </span>
	</p>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Have a
	meaningful amount of development work planned or completed above its
	dependencies, parent project, or previous incarnation.</b><span style="font-weight: normal">
	We will not accept projects which cannot prove themselves to be more
	than a thin layer of “glue code” above several libraries, or
	which are barely-modified forks of other projects.</span></p>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Be the
	development effort of an individual or small team, organization or
	company.</b><span style="font-weight: normal"> We wish to keep the
	focus of this site on projects which highlight the inspiring work of
	small developers, projects which provide a high ratio of value-added
	to man-hours worked, and the exploration of software creation as a
	craft. We will refrain from defining “small” for the purposes of
	this guideline, and instead give examples of approvals and
	rejections:</span></p>
	<ol type="i">
		<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">
		A commercial compression tool developed by a small team of 2-4
		programmers and a few miscellaneous staff under the umbrella of an
		LLC would be approved.</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">
		A suite of productivity software developed by a large multinational
		corporation would be rejected, as it is not in line with the
		intended focus of the site, and such a corporation is likely
		already receiving widespread exposure elsewhere and may have their
		own extensive user community.</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">
		An existing, well-established open-source project with a
		contributor count at the time of submission in the thousands may be
		approved or rejected depending on other factors like the age of the
		project, the number of current contributors, the content to be
		provided on Handmade Network vs the project's homepage, and the
		current state of development of the project.</p>
	</li></ol>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Enrich to the
	community </b><span style="font-weight: normal">by releasing
	finished projects for community members to use or purchase and
	providing regular updates that inform and educate community members.
	We heavily encourage activities such as:</span></p>
	<ol type="i">
		<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">
		Writing or recording logs/articles explaining decisions/trade-offs
		made during development and their rationale, theory behind a piece
		of code, information discovered about an API or dependency.</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal">
		Releasing demos, samples, or pre-release versions demonstrating the
		mechanics or evolution of a particular feature</p>
		</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><span style="font-weight: normal">Responding
		to questions about functionality in comments/forums</span><b>.</b></p>
	</li></ol>
</li></ol>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>	</b><span style="font-weight: normal">For
    more information on this, please see our <a href="/monthly-update-policy">Monthly Update Policy</a>
	requirements and suggestions.</span></p>
<ol start="5">
	<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Have a clear,
	achievable goal or set of goals</b><span style="font-weight: normal">,
	and </span><b>provide lasting value to its intended audience.</b><span style="font-weight: normal">
	We want to discourage projects from falling into development limbo
	and slowly dying off. We also want to encourage project owners to
	support their projects past release, so that they might have
	continuing usefulness as the dependencies and platforms they rely on
	continue to develop.</span></p>
</li></ol>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br>
</p>
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><span style="font-weight: normal">Additionally,
there are some criteria that we guarantee will </span><b>not</b><span style="font-weight: normal">
be considered in approving or rejecting a project:</span></p>
<ol>
	<li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Implementation
	language</b><span style="font-weight: normal">. A language is merely
	a tool, and worthwhile software can be created in any language or
	environment.</span></p>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>Use (or not) of
	libraries</b><span style="font-weight: normal">. While we are
	supportive of efforts to develop software that makes minimal use of
	libraries, and to write code that supplants existing libraries, this
	is by no means a requirement of projects hosted on the site. We
	merely ask, as stated above, that projects perform some significant
	work above that which its dependencies perform on their own.</span></p>
	</li><li><p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in"><b>License,
	monetization, and source-code provision</b><span style="font-weight: normal">.
	We do not require projects be open-source, free software, etc. While
	we are very supportive of these movements and the principles behind
	them, we also understand the need to make a living off of
	development work, and wish to make it possible for any project to
	contribute to and benefit from our software development community.</span></p>
</li></ol>
