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Contributing Guidelines and Codes of Conduct for Open Projects

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Sebastián Ayala

MSc student: Maastricht University

Community member/contributor: OLS, The Carpentries, Streamlit, ISCBSC

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@sayalaruano

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What is project culture?

  • Build a community
  • Diverse members
  • Help build & guide the culture
    • Make conscious decisions!
    • What are the project values?
    • How should people behave?

Image by The Turing Way project and Scriberia under CC-BY 4.0 License

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What is project culture?

A project is more than its goals!

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It’s a language, shared set of norms, people’s expectations, tools, how decisions are made, the project identity...

Image by The Turing Way project and Scriberia under CC-BY 4.0 License

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  • Clear contribution guidelines
  • Code of Conduct that is enforced

How to build your project culture

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  • How people collaborate to the project?

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  • Not only coding
    • Planning events
    • Designing
    • Documentation
    • Answering questions
    • Creating tutorials
    • …

Image by The Turing Way project and Scriberia under CC-BY 4.0 License

What is Contribution?

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Creating a CONTRIBUTING.md on GitHub

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  • Structure contributions
  • Provide guidelines
  • Standard style
  • Improve efficiency
  • Involve new people

WHY?

  • Owners: organisation
  • Contributors: all members
  • Consumers: users & members

WHO?

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Example from The Turing Way

https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

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Example from igraph

https://github.com/igraph/igraph/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

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Example from AlphaFold

https://github.com/deepmind/alphafold/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

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Example from The Carpentries - contributors page

https://carpentries.org/community/

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Example from Scikit-learn - contributors page

https://scikit-learn.org/dev/developers/contributing

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Repositories of Open Source projects

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A place for diverse communities

Image by Bérénice Batut at CarpentryCon 2018: https://www.flickr.com/photos/134305289@N03/40708346970/in/photostream/

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… but what if ‘SOMETHING’ happens?

Image by Bérénice Batut at CarpentryCon 2018:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/134305289@N03/42464629032/in/photostream/

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code of conduct (n).

a set of rules outlining the social norms, rules, & responsibilities of an individual project, party or organization.

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Commonly abbreviated as “CoC”

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  • Invites people to your project
  • Sets clear expectations on your community members
  • Tells contributors that you care about your community

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... Yes!!

Do you REALLY need a CoC?

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Example from PyCon conference

https://us.pycon.org/2020/about/code-of-conduct/

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Additional examples

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Getting started….

  • Brainstorm core words that represent community values
  • Consider behaviors to encourage/discourage
  • Think through process for incidents and complaints.
  • What are consequences for those acting outside norms?
  • Understand/accept your role as project lead

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Emma Karoune, Malvika Sharan, Lilly Winfree, and Karin Lagesen for slides of previous OLS cohorts

Thank you!

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What Open Science dreams will you achieve?

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Sebastián Ayala

MSc student: Maastricht University

Community member/contributor: OLS, The Carpentries, Streamlit, ISCBSC

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@sayalaruano