OpenWorm Community

This page contains information intended to help individuals understand what steps to take to make contributions to OpenWorm, how to join OpenWorm meetings, how to interact with the community online, and how to become an OpenWorm core member.

Contribution Best Practices

Once you have identified an issue you want to work on from a particular project, please announce your intention to helping out on the mailing list and by commenting on the specific GitHub issue. Making a contribution of code to the project will first involve forking one of our repositories, making changes, committing them, creating a pull request back to the original repo, and then updating the appropriate part of documentation.

An alternate way to contribute is to create a new GitHub repo yourself and begin tackling some issue directly there. We can then fork your repo back into the OpenWorm organization at a later point in order to bring other contributors along to help you.

Another great way to contribute is by organizing ideas or documentation or proposals via a Google doc, and then sharing the link on our mailing list.

Using OpenWorm repos on GitHub

More details on best practices using OpenWorm repos on GitHub are available on a separate page.

Creating organizing documents

To contribute documentation and materials to the OpenWorm Google Drive, log into your Gmail account and click on this link.

All documents located in the OpenWorm folder is viewable to the public. Comments can be added to both text documents and spreadsheets. In order to edit existing documents or to add a new document, you will need to be added to the folder. You can request access by email your Google ID to info@openworm.org.

OpenWorm Docs

Taking notes as Google docs

It is very useful to create notes and progress reports as the result of meetings as Google docs. Docs should be shared publicly with view and comment access.

An effective progress report should contain the following information:

  • Meeting title
  • Attendees
  • Date
  • Goal being worked on (link back to doc page describing project)
  • Previous accomplishments
  • Recent progress towards goal
  • Next Steps
  • Future Steps

An example of an effective progress report is available online.

Once the document is shared, it should be announced on the mailing list.

Creating proposals as Google docs

To gather public comment on a direction for the project, it is often effective to create a proposal as a world-editable Google Doc. Once your document is created and shared, it should be announced on the mailing list.

An example of an effective proposal is available online

Contributing to the OpenWorm documentation

The OpenWorm documentation is a searchable repository of knowledge we have assembled to help new users get oriented to the different areas of the project. When new contributions are made, it is important that they are incorporated into the appropriate part of the documentation.

When they are ready to consume by the general public, simulation engines, visualization environments, and data sets should be added to the resources page.

Information about the goals, progress, and roadmap of current or proposed projects should be added to the projects page.

The docs use rst format. This kind of markup is a bit verbose and unforgiving in its syntax compared to other languages, but it is convenient for publishing documentation to the ReadTheDocs service directly from the GitHub repo, so we use it.

The ‘master outline’ for the top level is in index.rst. The ‘toctree’ directive in this file sets up what is on the sidebar. This assumes that files with the names under the toctree are present in the same directory as index.rst. Under this, the next level of hierarchy is determined by section headers. In the projects page we’ve used a hidden toctree in the file, which is creating the next level of hierarchy in the sidebar. In that toctree, you can see an example of referencing the underlying directory structure (e.g. ‘Projects/worm-movement’).

Guest Blog Post

We love hearing about what members are of the OpenWorm community are doing. If you have something to share, contact us at info@openworm.org to discuss.

Journal Clubs

Every few months an academic journal article comes along we can’t resist talking about. We host a journal club where we invite scientists to present on the paper and to host a discussion about it, hopefully with some of the article authors.

You can see past journal clubs we have conducted online.

If you have an idea for a good journal club, please post the suggestion on our mailing list.

Meetings

Team meetings

We have a regular meeting of the team that is building applications every two weeks. We also currently schedule an ad-hoc data team meeting about every 3-4 weeks. The events are on our community calendar. The events are streamed live when they occur and an archive of the meeting videos and the minutes are kept online.

Working meetings

Contributors are encouraged to meet with each other on a regular basis to advance areas of the project they need interaction on.

IRC meetings

We had been running meetings on IRC for some time but have currently discontinued the practice. If there is interest in reviving this, please post on the mailing list.

Scheduling meetings

We like using the Doodle service for scheduling meetings. This makes it easy to find times to meet across various time zones. Once a meeting is scheduled, we will often create a Google+ event to track it and remind everyone it is occurring.

Interactions

Mailing Lists

There are two Google Groups in connection with OpenWorm. We suggest joining both lists to stay current, introduce yourself to the project, and participate in ongoing discussions. Simply login with you Gmail username and click on “Join Group” for each list.

This list is for general updates and announcements related to the project.

This list is for high-volume type technical discussions, day-to-day communications, and questions related to the OpenWorm project.

Google Plus

OpenWorm Google+

Click on the “Follow” button to be a part of the OpenWorm community on Google+.

If you need more help with Google+, check out the handy guide put out by Google.

YouTube

Our YouTube channel

Playlists

  • Status Updates - Biweekly updates from the OpenWorm team.
  • Journal Clubs - Like journal clubs that meet in person, the OpenWorm journal clubs use discuss new discoveries, tools and resources related to neuroscience, C. elegans, computational biology and open source science. Journal clubs are posted to social media in advance for any to watch and recordings then become available on YouTube.
  • Data Team meetings
  • Real c. elegans
  • Building Blocks

Twitter

Our Twitter feed

Want to tag OpenWorm on a tweet? Use @openworm and share the love.

Blog

Our blog is hosted in Tumblr.

Membership

More information about the membership policy is available on a separate page.