The Well

Contribute

The Well grows through public contributions. There are five paths, depending on what you can offer. All contributions are welcome under the project licenses.

1. Add a jurisdiction

Each new court requires a scraper that fetches the judge index, the standing orders, and the chambers-rules pages, plus extractors that parse those documents into the YAML schema.

Start with the contributing guide and the existing CASD scraper at scrapers/casd/ as a reference implementation. The scraper must produce YAML that validates against the schema.

2. Improve an extractor

The shared extractors at scrapers/common/extractors.py turn standing-order text into structured procedural fields. Improving them — better page-limit detection, more accurate cadence inference, new topic tags — improves every judge page in every jurisdiction. Tests are required for all extractor changes; fixtures live in scrapers/common/tests/fixtures/.

3. Correct a judge card

Errors happen — court pages move, standing orders are revised, a regex misses an edge case. Two ways to flag a correction:

  • File an issue Open a GitHub issue with the data:correction label. Include the judge page URL, the field, the current value, and a citation for the correct value.
  • Open a pull request Edit the YAML in data/judges/{jurisdiction}/ and update the matching sources entry. CI will reject changes that lack a citation.

4. Contribute as an attorney

California-barred attorneys can contribute observations from courtrooms they have appeared in. Observations cover the things that do not appear in standing orders: how strictly a judge enforces meet-and-confer, actual oral-argument length, whether chambers will field a quick scheduling question by phone.

Applications are manually reviewed against active California State Bar records. Verified contributors receive a credential that submits observations through a path designed so that no operator — including the maintainer — can link a specific observation to a specific contributor. See docs/anonymity.md for the architecture.

The attorney application portal is not yet open. Check back soon, or watch the repository for the announcement.

5. Sponsor the project

The Well does not run advertising or take commercial partnerships. Voluntary GitHub Sponsors contributions fund domain renewals, optional infrastructure beyond Cloudflare's free tier, and bug-bounty payouts. Sponsorship does not confer editorial influence.

What does not count as a contribution

  • Subjective opinions. The Well does not publish ratings, ideological labels, or commentary on outcomes.
  • Unsourced facts. Every procedural field requires a citation — a court URL, a standing-order PDF, a PACER-derived statistic, or an aggregated contributor observation.
  • AI-generated content. Submissions produced by language models are out of scope. Extractors must be deterministic.
  • Litigant-side commentary. Observations from parties, not their counsel, are out of scope.

Code of conduct and security

Contributors are expected to follow the code of conduct. Security findings should be disclosed under SECURITY.md; cash rewards are available for qualifying reports.