Added CONTRIBUTING.md, updated README.md

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+# Contributing to the backend
+
+## Make sure you don't break the existing tests
+Currently there are unit tests using `unittest` from the Python Standard Library in the
+[backend/tests/](backend/tests/) directory. In addition, we have continuous integration
+setup on Github. Everytime someone makes a pull request to `master`, Github
+automatically starts testing the code and shows the result in the pull request. Have a
+look at [this pull request](https://github.com/davidatbu/openFraming/pull/144) where
+this continuous integration was setup for what that looks like.
+
+Therefore, before making any pull requests that affect the backend, it is wise to make
+sure that all the tests are passing locally on your machine. To run all the tests, you
+can type the following command assuming your current working directory is `backend/`
+
+	$ python -m unittest
+
+If you've never done unit testing before, have a look at
+[backend/tests/test_utils.py](backend/tests/test_utils.py), which has a testing for one
+method from the `Validate` class in
+[backend/flask_app/utils.py](backend/flask_app/utils.py). Additionally, the
+[official documentation on the `unittest`
+library](https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html) is pretty readable. If you
+will be writing code dealing with Flask, I would suggest you try to understand the
+`TestClassifiers.test_get` method in
+[test_classifier.py](backend/tests/test_classifier.py), and you'll have to read parts of
+[Flask's documentation on testing](https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/testing/).
+
+## You're encouraged to write your own tests
+If you contribute new features, you'll have to make sure that they don't break existing
+functionality. Feel free to make a pull request even if the tests are not passing
+locally, and we can debug together.
+
+You're not required to write new tests for new features, but you are welcome to!

README.md

@@ -14,11 +14,19 @@ Python 3.5 or higher is required (due to use of PEP 526 style annotations).
 
 ### Download additional requirements
 
+### Install Redis
+This step will depend on your operating system. On Ubuntu, this is as simple as:
+
+	$ sudo apt-get install redis
+
+For Windows, you might have to look at [Memiurai](https://www.memurai.com), a drop-in replacement for 
+Redis.
+
 ### NLTK Corpora
 	$ python -m nltk.downloader stopwords wordnet
 
 ### Mallet
-The installation of the Mallet library will depend on your platform. Have a look 
+The installation of the Mallet library will depend on your operating system. Have a look 
 at the [installation instructions on their website.](http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/download.php). 
 On Unix, it would look something like:
 
@@ -27,7 +35,7 @@ On Unix, it would look something like:
 	$ tar -xvf ~/mallet-2.0.8.tar.gz --one-top-level=$HOME/mallet
 
 One then has to export the directory where the mallet executable is found as an environment variable.
-(This also depends on your platform).
+(This also depends on your operating system).
 
 	$ export MALLET_BIN_DIRECTORY=$HOME/mallet/mallet-2.0.8/bin