added detail about cla process

CONTRIBUTING.md

@@ -26,6 +26,16 @@ Follow these steps to make a contribution to any of our open source repositories
 
         git config --global user.name "Firstname Lastname"
         git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
+        
+1. All contributions should be sent using GitHub "Pull Requests", which is the only way the project will accept them and creates a nice audit trail and structured approach.
+
+The originating github user has to either have a github id on-file with the list of approved users that have signed the CLA or they can be a public "member" of a GitHub organization for a group that has signed the corporate CLA. This enables the corporations to manage their users themselves instead of having to tell us when someone joins/leaves an organization. By removing a user from an organization's GitHub account, their new contributions are no longer approved because they are no longer covered under a CLA.
+
+If a contribution is deemed to be covered by an existing CLA, then it is analyzed for engineering quality and product fit before merging it.
+
+If a contribution is not covered by the CLA, then the automated CLA system notifies the submitter politely that we cannot identify their CLA and ask them to sign either an individual or corporate CLA. This happens automatially as a comment on pull requests.
+
+When the project receives a new CLA, it is recorded in the project records, the CLA is added to the database for the automated system uses, then we manually make the Pull Request as having a CLA on-file.
 
 ## General Workflow