From 701ea219d421358b3641c038e5ef37ea23cd165c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Nithin <sarvanithin@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2026 04:12:50 -0400
Subject: [PATCH] docs: add public contribution roadmap

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+# OpenRole public roadmap
+
+OpenRole is an evidence-first job-intelligence project for current U.S. roles.
+This roadmap explains where contributions have the most leverage. It is not a
+promise of employer sponsorship or a claim that every company is covered.
+
+## Near-term priorities
+
+### 1. Broader verified employer coverage
+
+- Add documented, public ATS connectors with complete-pagination tests.
+- Verify employer-controlled career pages and correct stale sources.
+- Improve company identity matching without guessing subsidiaries or aliases.
+
+### 2. Better U.S.-only job quality
+
+- Improve location parsing for remote, hybrid, multi-location, and territory
+  postings.
+- Add regression cases when a non-U.S. role reaches a public result.
+- Improve freshness and closure observations without treating a transient empty
+  response as a closed job.
+
+### 3. Explainable sponsorship evidence
+
+- Add tests for real-world wording that should be explicit positive, explicit
+  negative, or insufficient evidence.
+- Improve reason text and accessibility of evidence explanations.
+- Keep current job-posting text separate from historical employer-level data.
+
+### 4. Public-beta operations
+
+- Improve deployment, health checks, backups, and observability.
+- Improve the public API documentation and developer setup experience.
+- Make the job explorer faster and more accessible on mobile devices.
+
+## A good first contribution
+
+The most useful first issues are small, testable, and auditable:
+
+- Correct an official employer career-page URL with public evidence.
+- Add a regression test for an H-1B evidence or U.S.-location edge case.
+- Improve an error message, documentation example, or accessibility detail.
+- Add tests for a documented public ATS endpoint.
+
+Please read [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) before starting. Do not submit
+credentials, applicant data, copied job descriptions, guessed URLs, or a
+private/reverse-engineered endpoint.
+
+## Definition of done for source coverage
+
+A company is not reported as covered merely because a URL exists. Before a
+source becomes active, OpenRole requires a reviewed, employer- or ATS-supported
+source identity, allowed collection policy, a complete-manifest probe, and a
+successful synchronization. See [docs/METHODOLOGY.md](docs/METHODOLOGY.md) and
+[docs/ARCHITECTURE.md](docs/ARCHITECTURE.md) for the full model.