To be able to work together on an open source project requires some guidelines as to how to act, work and communicate with each other. Together this forms our ethos. A common ethos is the rationale of every active community. At Offcourse we believe in accelerating learning, which is why we named this our ethos. 

## Accelerating learning

Accelerating learning is not only about learning faster, but also learning smarter. This is especially relevant in our digital world where we are given an overload of information. You can learn anything on the web today, with the help of tutorials, blog posts, podcasts etc. But to find that piece of information you are looking for, without having to go through an entire document or video, is what helps us to learn faster **and** smarter.  It has a close link to the theory of just-in-time learning where learning is tailored to one's needs.  

Offcourse thinks about how to optimize the concept of learning, using the principles of the just-in-time learning theory, amongst others. We start at the basics, rather than starting at the end, like many online learning platforms and initiatives do. We ask ourselves questions like: Why do people learn something? How do people learn? And, what do we need to learn best? Our mission is to accelerate learning to **avoid the waste of talent** due to not having the available resources to develop oneself (time, money, etc) or due to sub-optimal processes that hinder someone's ability to learn.

## Guidelines

What does this have to do with you contributing to this open source project, you might wonder. Contributing to an open source project is often a learning process in itself; working with someoneelse's material, people you don't know yet. And you should practice what you preach, right? We therefore defined a set of guidelines for us as a community for our learning journey:
* Openness - We work on an open source project together and feel that it's important to be open as a community as well. This means we are open about our contribution to one another
* Ownership - All community members are encouraged to take responsibility/ ownership for the technical development of the Offcourse product, it’s an important skill in your working life as well
* Collaboration - We are a community who work together, not in isolation
* Developing together - We actively seek for help from others within the community whenever we need and help each other grow our coding, design or writing skills
* Make use of knowledge that is already out there - This is linked to the former guideline, but also means we make use of external sources like blog posts or podcasts that can help our development
* Failure is an opportunity to learn - Contributing to open source projects is a way to learn new or more skills. Seeing what went wrong in learning something new is learning in and of itself. Just be open about it when it happens, so someone within the community can help you

Above all, we want you to have fun and enjoy your time. Let's develop together!
