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Contributing to MajorOps

MajorOps is a living document. Contributions are welcome — but this is not a wiki. Quality and coherence matter more than volume.

What Belongs Here

Improvements to existing docs:

  • Corrections to factual claims (especially about ICS, EMD, NTSB, or aviation standards)
  • Clarity improvements — places where the writing is ambiguous or assumes too much
  • Real-world examples that illustrate a principle
  • Edge cases or failure modes the current docs don't address

New frameworks or approaches:

  • Extensions to the command structure for specific industry contexts (healthcare IT, fintech, public sector)
  • Additional borrowed-from-emergency-services patterns not yet documented
  • Worked examples: "here is how we applied this to a real P1"

Glossary additions:

  • Terms used in practice that are not yet defined
  • Industry-standard terms that should be disambiguated from MajorOps usage

What Does Not Belong Here

  • Platform or tool-specific implementation guides (that's the companion platform repo)
  • ITIL module translations — this framework does not map 1:1 to ITIL and we're not trying to
  • Opinion pieces or commentary — everything here should be defensible as operational practice
  • Anything that hasn't been tested against a real incident

How to Contribute

  1. Open an issue first for anything substantive. Describe what you think is missing, wrong, or incomplete. Discussion before writing.
  2. For small corrections (typos, broken links, obvious factual errors), a PR is fine directly.
  3. New documents should follow the existing format: clinical, direct, no buzzwords, no consultant-speak.
  4. Reference your sources. If you're extending from ICS, EMD, NTSB, or another discipline, say so.

Writing Standards

Read the existing docs before contributing. The voice is:

  • Clinical, not corporate. "Incident resolved. Duration: 2h 14m." Not "we're excited to report full restoration."
  • Direct. Lead with the point. Context follows.
  • Opinionated. This work has a point of view. Contributions should too.
  • Sourced. Ideas borrowed from other disciplines should be credited.

A Note on Authorship

MajorOps builds on the work of Rob Schnepp, Ron Vidal, FEMA NIMS, and the broader emergency services community. New contributions should honor that lineage — be clear about what you're building on and what you're adding.

If you apply any of this in your organization and it produces results worth sharing, open an issue. Real-world validation is the most valuable contribution this project can receive.

A Note on AI Tools

Some of the writing and structure in this project was drafted with AI assistance. This is disclosed transparently: AI was used as a drafting and synthesis tool, not as a source of operational knowledge. Every claim about ICS, EMD, NTSB methodology, or aviation standards has been reviewed against primary sources. If you find an error introduced by this process, please open an issue. The standard is accuracy, not authorship purity.