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Contributing

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry are open source projects, and we welcome contributions of all kinds: new lessons, fixes to existing material, bug reports, and reviews of proposed changes are all welcome.

Contributor Agreement

By contributing, you agree that we may redistribute your work under our license. In exchange, we will address your issues and/or assess your change proposal as promptly as we can, and help you become a member of our community. Everyone involved in Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry agrees to abide by our code of conduct.

How to Contribute

The easiest way to get started is to file an issue to tell us about a spelling mistake, some awkward wording, or a factual error. This is a good way to introduce yourself and to meet some of our community members.

  1. If you do not have a GitHub account, you can send us comments by email. However, we will be able to respond more quickly if you use one of the other methods described below.

  2. If you have a GitHub account, or are willing to create one, but do not know how to use Git, you can report problems or suggest improvements by creating an issue. This allows us to assign the item to someone and to respond to it in a threaded discussion.

  3. If you are comfortable with Git, and would like to add or change material, you can submit a pull request (PR). Instructions for doing this are included below.

Where to Contribute

  1. If you wish to change this lesson, please work in https://github.com/swcarpentry/FIXME, which can be viewed at https://swcarpentry.github.io/FIXME.

  2. If you wish to change the example lesson, please work in https://github.com/swcarpentry/lesson-example, which documents the format of our lessons and can be viewed at https://swcarpentry.github.io/lesson-example.

  3. If you wish to change the template used for workshop websites, please work in https://github.com/swcarpentry/workshop-template. The home page of that repository explains how to set up workshop websites, while the extra pages in https://swcarpentry.github.io/workshop-template provide more background on our design choices.

  4. If you wish to change CSS style files, tools, or HTML boilerplate for lessons or workshops stored in _includes or _layouts, please work in https://github.com/swcarpentry/styles.

What to Contribute

There are many ways to contribute, from writing new exercises and improving existing ones to updating or filling in the documentation and submitting bug reports about things that don't work, aren't clear, or are missing. If you are looking for ideas, please see the 'Issues' tab for a list of issues associated with this repository, or you may also look at the issues for Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry projects.

Comments on issues and reviews of pull requests are just as welcome: we are smarter together than we are on our own. Reviews from novices and newcomers are particularly valuable: it's easy for people who have been using these lessons for a while to forget how impenetrable some of this material can be, so fresh eyes are always welcome.

What Not to Contribute

Our lessons already contain more material than we can cover in a typical workshop, so we are usually not looking for more concepts or tools to add to them. As a rule, if you want to introduce a new idea, you must (a) estimate how long it will take to teach and (b) explain what you would take out to make room for it. The first encourages contributors to be honest about requirements; the second, to think hard about priorities.

We are also not looking for exercises or other material that only run on one platform. Our workshops typically contain a mixture of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux users; in order to be usable, our lessons must run equally well on all three.

Using GitHub

If you choose to contribute via GitHub, you may want to look at How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub. To manage changes, we follow GitHub flow. Each lesson has two maintainers who review issues and pull requests or encourage others to do so. The maintainers are community volunteers and have final say over what gets merged into the lesson. To use the web interface for contributing to a lesson:

  1. Fork the originating repository to your GitHub profile.
  2. Within your version of the forked repository, move to the gh-pages branch and create a new branch for each significant change being made.
  3. Navigate to the file(s) you wish to change within the new branches and make revisions as required.
  4. Commit all changed files within the appropriate branches.
  5. Create individual pull requests from each of your changed branches to the gh-pages branch within the originating repository.
  6. If you receive feedback, make changes using your issue-specific branches of the forked repository and the pull requests will update automatically.
  7. Repeat as needed until all feedback has been addressed.

When starting work, please make sure your clone of the originating gh-pages branch is up-to-date before creating your own revision-specific branch(es) from there. Additionally, please only work from your newly-created branch(es) and not your clone of the originating gh-pages branch. Lastly, published copies of all the lessons are available in the gh-pages branch of the originating repository for reference while revising.

Other Resources

General discussion of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry happens on the discussion mailing list, which everyone is welcome to join. You can also reach us by email.