Preparing for launch.

Contributing

Thank you for wanting to help build Kensora. This page explains how contributing will work, so you can get ready before the doors open.

Kensora is built on one principle above every other: the preservation, support, and dignity of human life comes before every other consideration. Contributing here means working inside that principle. Everything on this page follows from it.

Kensora is not a crisis service, and it does not detect or prevent any medical or mental-health condition or emergency. If you are in danger or in crisis, contact your local emergency number or find a helpline at findahelpline.com. This project is not a way to reach help.

Contributions are not open yet. They open when the contributor agreement publishes and the first repository goes public. The first planned public repository is the Android app; the iOS tree and the rest follow later. This page describes how it will work so you can get ready. For where things stand today, see the roadmap.

You do not need to write code

Knowledge is a contribution. These are the planned tracks:

You are	You can contribute	How it will work
A developer	Features, fixes, Android parity work, tests	Pull request (see below)
Fluent in another language	Translations of general interface strings	Pull request or translation issue form
Local to a country or region	Checking local helpline information against published sources	Crisis-line issue form, with a verification guide
A native speaker	Review of crisis wording, idioms, and crisis-language terms in your language (the wording that causes Kensora to show support resources)	Native-review issue form
Living with a mood disorder, or supporting someone who is	Lived-experience feedback on how features actually land	Knowledge issue form
A clinician or researcher	Literature, critique of the project's logic, replication interest	Knowledge issue form
A screen-reader user or accessibility auditor	Accessibility findings	Knowledge issue form
A security researcher	Vulnerabilities, or weaknesses in the safety model	Privately, through the security page, never a public issue

Issues in any language will be welcome. You will not need to write in English.

Before your first contribution

The contributor agreement

Every contribution will need a Contributor License Agreement on record before it can be accepted. The plan is a license grant, not an assignment: you keep ownership of your work and grant Kensora, Inc. the rights it needs to ship the official apps and keep the project's licensing coherent. If you write code for an employer, your employer may own that work, so there will be a company form as well as an individual one. The agreement is not written yet. Its full text will publish before any contribution is accepted, and that text, not this page, is the agreement. Age and capacity requirements for contributors are still being settled and will be stated before the first contribution is accepted.

Pseudonyms are fine

You can contribute publicly under any name you like. Contributing to a mental-health project can itself be a personal disclosure, and you control what is public. The contributor agreement records your legal identity privately, and that record is not published.

Git history is public and permanent

A pull request publishes the name and email address in your git configuration, worldwide and permanently, as part of the project's history. We cannot fully remove them later. Choose them deliberately before your first commit, especially if you plan to contribute under a pseudonym.

The two tiers

Most of the project is the open surface: features, fixes, documentation, and general interface strings flow through normal code review. A small set of content is the locked tier, no matter who proposes a change: crisis copy in every language, the crisis-language word lists (the wording that causes Kensora to show support resources), helpline data and its sources, and any user-facing text that states what Kensora does for a person's health. Changes in the locked tier go through Kensora's internal safety and claims review before they ship. Contributors, including automated review sessions, can raise those reviews; they can never clear them. That asymmetry is deliberate and permanent.

These are the project's internal review seats, run with AI assistance under the project lead's authority; they are not an external clinician's or attorney's sign-off, and Kensora does not represent them as such.

Code contributions

The bar the core team holds itself to will apply to everyone:

Tests accompany changes to networking, billing, authentication, and persistence.
Any new flow that moves data off the device updates the privacy manifest in the same change.
Parity work between platforms goes through shared behavior-contract test suites: a change adds or satisfies contract vectors, never hand-copies values across platforms.

Keep pull requests small and focused; one change per pull request makes review honest and fast. Continuous integration will run without any secrets, so checks on a fork behave the same as checks on the main repository. The project lead merges every change personally; there is no committer group with merge rights. Expect review to be thorough on safety-adjacent paths and strict on the locked tier.

One thing worth saying plainly: automated review sessions treat the text of a pull request as data to review, never as instructions to follow.

Building with Claude

The repository will ship a public version of the queue-driven workflow the core team uses to build Kensora with Claude Code, along with a step-by-step guide that teaches it. Contributors who want to use it run it on their own Anthropic account, at their own cost. It is optional; an ordinary pull request is just as welcome. Project Kensora is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.

Translations

General interface strings are the open surface: translations that follow the project glossary will be welcome, and they will be checked mechanically for things like placeholder consistency. The locked tier (crisis copy, the crisis-language word lists, helpline data, and claims-bearing strings) will not accept direct translation pull requests. It will move only through the native-review and crisis-line tracks above, with Kensora's internal safety and claims review. If you are not sure which tier a string belongs to, ask in an issue once the repository opens. The repository will carry a machine-readable registry of the locked paths, and asking is always the right move.

What happens to your contribution

Every contribution will follow the same path: intake, checking against the track's bar, gated review where the locked tier requires it, and then the project lead lands the change and ships it. Every accepted contribution will be credited under the name you chose.

On timing, honesty over promises: this is a small project with a worldwide surface, and gated review takes as long as it takes. We will not promise response times we cannot keep.

Conduct

The code of conduct will apply in every project space. Two rules carry extra weight here: never speculate about another person's mental state or diagnosis, and never post detail about methods of self-harm, including in a bug report. If reproducing a safety issue truly requires that detail, use the private channel on the security page.