oss-archetypes

Establishing a “minimum standard of care” for open source scientific software

Last update: June 12, 2024

This is a companion document to the OS Scientific Software Project Archetypes framework, which aims to provide tailored recommendations to help OSS research software developers and teams align their OSS practices with their project’s goals. Once the items below have been taken care of, hop over there for more specific guidance.

This document is meant to outline the “table stakes” practices needed to work in the open.

Note that we do not cover engineering best practices here as there are many references available; this document is focused on communicating with the external community and, when relevant, creating an architecture of participation.

Minimum standards of care

• The README and/or main landing page of the project clearly states the following:
  • The maintenance status of the project
  • How decisions are made, and by whom (i.e., governance). Is this only the founding / internal team? Is this a formal governing committee? Is this a wide open democratic project?
  • Who contributes code to the project? Is this only the founding / internal team, or are external contributions welcome? If external contributors are accepted and/or encouraged, see the additional requirements below.
• The project can be redeployed by someone outside of the project’s home institution. This will be a bigger lift for some project archetypes (e.g., a scientific platform) than others (e.g., a scientific library).

For projects where external contributions are an important part of their current development and/or long-term sustainability plan, the following are also required:

• Contributor guidelines, including an easy onramp
• A public-facing, high-level roadmap
• A plan for providing support to contributors

[WIP] We are working on providing example language and templates for these items to make it super easy. Stay tuned!

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