Contributing
How to contribute to echinopscis
We welcome contributions - and these don’t have to be technical in nature - feature requests, questions and suggestions are all helpful. These are all managed as github issues - so you’ll need to sign up for a github login, and then you can add issues or comment on existing discussions.
Ideas for potential contributions
- Evaluation of the software as a tool for research management, either as a lone researcher or with a group of collaborators
- Documentation of working practices - especially those defining information resources that need to be searched and linked, and data repositories which need to be populated as part of the publication process
- Definition of requirements
- Plugin development, e.g.:
- Visualisation plugin to display phylogenies
- Development of quickadd scripts and templates, e.g.:
- Quickadd plugin to access genomic resources
- Documentation of useful plugins, or how to configure / use in different ways, e.g.:
- Evaluation of different graph / network display plugins (e.g. Juggl)
- Display of TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions polygons on leaflet map
- Evaluation of alternative personal knowledge management software - alternatives to Obsidian such as logseq etc.
Why use github?
Our colleagues at GBIF, Atlas of Living Australia, iDigBio, Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) and many other organisations use github to manage their projects - including documentation and community-building as well as the management of technical resources like source code. If you’ve ever submitted feedback or reported a problem via the GBIF data portal, your report would have resulted in a “portal-feedback” github issue, meaning that other users have maximum visibility of known issues, work-arounds and fixes. Management of issues and proposed features “in the open” also enables users to participate in prioritisation. The github environment is well-documented and many open science resources are available which explain how to use it. In the future, if it is necessary to move from github to a different platform, we would be able to collaborate and learn from our colleagues about how best to do this.
Code of conduct
We ask all participants to respect the code of conduct for this project.