contribution-workflow

# Contribution workflow A skill for creating a structured contribution workflow covering the full journey from proposal to release. Output is a document teams can actually follow — not a policy statement, but a process with named stages, decision criteria, and clear ownership at each gate. ## Before you begin: verify references Before doing anything else, confirm that every file listed in this skill's frontmatter `references:` field exists at its relative path from this SKILL.md. If any are missing, stop — the install is incomplete. This usually means a third-party installer (for example `npx skills install`) flattened the skill into a standalone folder and dropped the repo-root `knowledge-notes/` directory this skill depends on. Tell the user to reinstall using a supported method from `1-INSTALL.md` (git clone, or the `.plugin` bundle in Cowork) and to run `verify-install.sh` from the install root to confirm the fix. Only proceed without the references if the user explicitly says to — and if they do, state clearly in your output that it was produced in degraded mode without the pack's reference material. ## Context Most design systems have one of two contribution problems. Either there is no process, so contributions arrive inconsistently and the design systems team becomes a bottleneck because every request is a negotiation. Or there is a process that is so heavy it discourages contribution entirely, and teams build locally rather than bother. The goal here is a workf...