Contributing to the RSEToolkit

Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Research Software Engineer’s (RSE) Toolkit.

The RSE Toolkit is an open source resource for anyone working as a Research Software Engineer, or as a researcher writing software, or indeed anyone who is interested in research software and can benefit from the resources and information provided.

We hope this will grow to become a large community resource and it can’t do this without you, our enthusiastic contributors. So, thanks in advance for anything you are able to contribute to this repository, whether it is ideas, content, corrections or some combination of these. We’re most greatful for anything you can provide.

Contributing ideas or content

If you’d like to contribute ideas or content to the RSEToolkit, or make corrections to existing material, there are a few things you need to be aware of:

  • How to contribute your ideas/material or suggest/make corrections
  • Adhering to our code of conduct
  • Licensing

How to contribute your ideas/material or suggest/make corrections

Use issues
Ideas or new content

Relating all contributions back to an issue helps us to keep track of the changes to content as the RSEToolkit develops and also provides a place for ongoing discussion on the development of specific pieces of content.

Even if you have prepared material that you’re ready to contribute, we ask that you please create an issue, filling out the “Requesting or providing new contentissue template and then open a pull request which you should link to your issue.

Corrections

If you’re suggesting corrections or changes to existing material, create an “Error reportissue and detail the suggested modifications according to the provided error report issue template.

If you’ve made corrections, in most cases we suggest creating an issue based on the “Error reportissue template, explaining the corrections you’ve made and linking your pull request to the issue.

However, for minor corrections, such as fixing a couple of typos or resolving a minor layout issue, you can submit your pull request directly, without creating an issue, and prefix the name with “Minor correction:”.

Use a fork and pull request workflow

We advise that you contribute to the RSEToolkit by using a standard fork and pull request workflow. As detailed in the linked document, this involves forking the RSEToolkit.github.io repository into your own GitHub account (or an organisation within which you’re able to create repositories), creating a branch for your changes in your fork and then committing your changes into that branch. You can then create a pull request to have your changes, from the branch in your fork, merged into the main branch of the RSEToolkit.github.io repository.

Adhering to our code of conduct

We value everyone’s contributions to this resource. To ensure that everyone feels welcome and able to suggest new material they’d like to see, contribute new content or engage in discussion about the RSE Toolkit’s content, it is important that you are aware of and adhere to our Code of Conduct.

The Code of Conduct applies to any interactions that you have in relation to the RSE Toolkit, either via GitHub, our Slack channel or any other such means.

Licensing

Please note that all material you contribute to the RSE Toolkit will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. By contributing material to this resource, you agree to the material being released under this licence and you agree that you have the right to contribute this material and to have it made available under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.