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Contributing

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François Delavy edited this page Mar 17, 2020 · 4 revisions

We appreciate that you want to contribute to the Safe Water Project! There are various ways to contribute to the project, outlined in this document.

If you want to contribute, you can get an idea of what we need by checking out our Project board, the Github Issues page, or the #water Slack channel. If you have some ideas on what to contribute that you didn't see, we'd love to hear your ideas on our Slack and on Tuesday nights.

Code Contributions Overview

Our project follows a standard Git workflow. If this is your first time working on a collaborative project with Git, check out this handy First Contributions guide. Additionally, the Getting Started guide in this project's /docs folder outlines steps 1-4.

The basic outline for making contributions is:

  1. Fork the project. (https://github.com/codeforboston/safe-water/fork)
  2. Clone your fork. (git clone https://github.com/<YOUR-USERNAME>/safe-water.git)
  3. Add a remote. (git remote add upstream https://github.com/codeforboston/safe-water.git)
  4. Checkout the master branch. (git checkout master)
  5. Make your changes! 😃
  6. Add the relative path(s) of the document(s) you added/changed. (git add <MY/DOC/PATH/HERE>)
  7. Commit those changes. (git commit -m "<DESCRIBE WHAT YOU DID>")
  8. On your forked repo, submit a Pull Request to the Code for Boston's master branch.
  9. Ask someone on the Slack channel to review your Pull Request.

We usually merge branches on Tuesday nights at the Code for Boston meetup.

All code goes into the code/ or notebooks/ subdirectories.

P.S. How to sync your fork with original (upstream) Code for Boston safe-water repo.

Modeling and Exploratory Contributions

Contributions to data modeling and exploratory data analysis are mainly being performed in Jupyter notebooks. If you are working in R, you can use Rmarkdown files.

If you want to contribute some analysis not covered on the Trello board, you may find it helpful to look through some recent notebooks to get a good idea of what work has already been done.

When providing code contributions for analyses, code should be documented and replicable. Notebooks should have easy instructions to reproduce the steps performed.

Data Collection and Cleaning Contributions

Some of the work we need done involves collecting new data that we do not currently have. Steps on how to contribute data is explained more thoroughly in the Data Documentation guide.

Research and Documentation Contributions

Our project is more than just what you see in the code/ folders. Research and documentation are incredibly important parts of the process. Without good research, we'd have no idea what to analyze, what data should be used in the models, and what our models should even look like. Without good documentation, nobody can follow what's going on.

Research is stored on our Google Drive and discussed in the Slack as well. Some of this research may also be summarized in the Docs on our Github.

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