## How to contribute

As an open source project, we welcome new contributors and appreciate your help.

Before you start working on an unresolved issue or try to implement a new feature, please contact us via our public [forum](https://groups.google.com/group/mapsforge-dev). We will then discuss the best way to realize your proposal and figure out how we can help you to get started quickly.

If you are only requesting a small change in the code, you may attach a patch file to the corresponding issue, but it is best to create a pull request on Github. Make sure that your patch is derived from the latest version in our **master** repository, otherwise we might be unable to apply it. Important is to keep pull requests simple with one feature in each. Please follow our code and style conventions.

Also please keep the pull request commits squashed, in order to avoid the clutter in repository and have only the finally changed files together. One way is described [here](http://gitready.com/advanced/2009/02/10/squashing-commits-with-rebase.html).

Regarding code make sure your IDE uses UTF-8 encoding, for indentation 4 spaces (no tabs) and follow the conventions you already see in the code.

Please note that the mapsforge project is licenced under the [GNU LGPL3 licence](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html). Thus, all your contributions are going to be published under this license.
