The purpose of this document is to outline the steps in the open source community contribution process. Every attempt has been made to steer clear of process implementation details such as what forms to use in order to clearly identify the PROCESS. An implementation document will follow that gives instructions on carrying out this process.
There are two categories of contributions: those that get checked into a source or content management system, and those that don't, but benefit the Pentaho projects nonetheless. The process defined here is very much geared toward the first kind of contribution, as they are easily identifiable, tangible and trackable.
Intangible contributions are as valuable (if not, arguably more so) to an open source project as tangible contributions. It is everyone's responsibility to look for these intangible contributions, and alert the Community Leader so that the contributor is recognized. Visit here for more details on identifying and processing intangible contributions.