Contribution guide

Welcome! We are pleased to know that you’re interested in contributing to MapReader!

MapReader is a collaborative project, now expanding its community beyond the initial group in the Living with Machines project (The Alan Turing Institute). We welcome all contributions but please follow these guidelines to make sure your contributions can be easily integrated into the project.

Joining the community

Before you begin contributing to MapReader, we would love for you to join our community and there are many ways to do this:

You can also get in touch with the MapReader team personally by:

Code of Conduct and inclusivity

We are currently in the process of developing a Code of Conduct. In the meantime, we look to the Code of Conduct from The Turing Way as a model.

We aim to be inclusive of people from all walks of life and all research fields. These intentions must be reflected in the contributions that we make.

We therefore encourage intentional, inclusive actions from contributors to MapReader. Here are a few examples of such actions:

  • Use respectful, gender-neutral and inclusive language (learn more about inclusive writing on page 22 of University of Leicester Study Skills pdf, also available as a zipped html).

  • Aim to include perspectives of researchers from different research backgrounds such as science, humanities and social sciences by not limiting the scope to only scientific domains.

  • Make sure that color palettes used throughout figures are accessible to color-blind readers and contributors.

Pre-requisites

Regardless of how you will be contributing to MapReader, you will need to:

  1. Ensure you have a GitHub account set up.

  2. Be able to use GitHub issues and pull requests - if you are unfamiliar with these, please look at our GitHub guide before continuing.

  3. Set up a virtual python environment and install MapReader (as per our Installation instructions).

  4. Have read this guide.

Ways to contribute

We welcome contributions from community members of all skill levels and so have written three different guides for different types of contributions:

  • Write a tutorial or worked example - For those who are familiar with using MapReader and would like to showcase an example of how to use it, but are not comfortable with using Sphinx to write documentation or writing code.

  • Add to or update the MapReader documentation - For those who are familiar with using MapReader and either already comfortable with using Sphinx to write documentation or feel able to have a go at to learning it.

  • Add to or update the MapReader code - For those who are familiar with using MapReader and either already comfortable with writing code in Python or feel able to have a go at learning it.

Guides