We welcome contributions! There are many ways to help out. By design, we're hoping to provide opportunities for people of many skill levels, and who can make different time commitments.
All projects listed on Discussions are seeking collaborators by default. Projects that are not looking for contributors are labeled as No longer seeking collaborators.
We don't view ARBOR as a single monolithic effort. Instead, the idea is to divide into "projects," where any research question with its own wiki page potentially counts as a project. Projects have four possible states:
If you start a project, or raise a research question, please be clear about whether you are:
- already working on it
- about to work on it
- will work on it if only if you can find collaborators
- just curious to know the answer, but have no time for it (and no expectation of authorship)
If you are just suggesting a research question, and don't have the time to follow up or work on it yourself, that's absolutely fine: but please be clear so that others know they have the opportunity to take the lead.
We strongly encourage designating "owners" for any active project: people who will play a large part, and who can devote time to making sure the research moves forward and thinking about the project as a whole. If you suggest a project that you're already working on, or are committing to work on, then it probably makes sense to label yourself as an owner. On the other hand, if you're joining a project with existing owners, please discuss with them before adding yourself.
Please only put yourself as an owner if you really can spend time on a project. If you later decide you can't, you can always take yourself off the owner list.
Once a project is underway--that is, people are starting to share ideas, share experimental results, and so on--things can get hectic. Although we encourage openness at all stages, it's conceivable that for a very active project it may be hard to manage a large number of contributors. In these cases, we encourage project owners to think about ways of subdividing work into multiple projects, or, if necessary, place a notice on the project page that they already have as many contributors as they can handle.
If a project never quite gets off the ground, and no one has time to devote to it, please remove any owners, and add the label Status: Inactive--and be welcoming to anyone who eventually does have time in the future.
A project is considered completed when experiments are done, the data is analyzed, and the results are written up in a report or publication. If a project ends with a paper or blog; the owners should prominently note that the project has been completed and add the label Status: Done. We ask that owners consider mentioning the ARBOR Project in reports and publications. (As a bonus: suggest future work building on the results, to seed new projects!)
We suggest a generous attitude toward providing credit to contributors. Please see CREDIT.md for details on how we see credit working for ARBOR projects. Please also see the license for material in this repo.