Get involved

The DMP Roadmap project team is always eager to hear about new ideas for enhancing our shared system. We welcome any and all feedback and are interested in engaging with you to help us build the next generation of data management planning software.

There are several ways for you to get involved:

• Follow us
• Report bugs/issues
• Share your ideas and suggest new features
• Translations
• Contribute code
• Improve documentation

1) Follow us

• Subscribe to our RSS feed to stay up to date on what the team is working on
• Watch this project on GitHub to get updates when changes are made (click 'Watch' in the upper right hand corner of this page)

2) Report bugs/issues

An easy and valuable way to help out is by simply letting us know about any issues you encounter while using the system. We always test changes made to the system but, as with any piece of software, there will be the occasional bug that slips by our defenses.

Please take a moment and look through the list of existing GitHub Issues before adding a new one. Someone else may have already reported the same issue. If so, add a comment and/or screenshot to provide additional details (this will help us prioritize the issue). The GitHub Issues page provides a search box and labels/tags that you can use to narrow down the list to see if something has already been reported.

If you don't see the issue listed then please create a new one. Be as descriptive as possible and outline the steps we can take to recreate the problem. For example: "I logged into the system as an organizational user, clicked edit plan (for plan X that was based on the NSF template) and got the following error message ...". Screenshots are also extremely helpful. You can add labels to your issue to help us categorize and prioritize the work.

Please note that the team has limited time and resources and so must prioritize the backlog of open issues and enhancement requests accordingly.

3) Share your ideas and suggest new features

The DMP Roadmap team welcomes your ideas for new enhancements and/or ways that we can integrate our tool into other systems. Your idea does not necessarily have to be fully formed. You can simply add a new issue to our GitHub Issues list and apply the 'suggestion' label to begin a conversation with the team.

Please check our development roadmap and the existing Suggestion list before creating a new issue. If someone has already contributed a similar idea, feel free to add a comment to that issue and join the conversation even if it's just to help promote the idea.

Don't forget to use the 'suggestion' label when creating your issue!

4) Translations

The DMP Roadmap team is looking for help with translating the system to other languages. Currently, we have translations for English, French, German, Spanish, Finnish, and Portuguese(Brazil). We use the ISO 639-1 standard codes for languages.

Anyone can contribute translations for this system via:

• Our translation portal (see the translation Wiki page for more information)
• By manually updating/adding translation files and sending us a Pull Request (see the app.po file instructions for more information)

5) Contribute code

The DMP Roadmap team is always interested in collaborating with other developers. If you are familiar with Ruby and the Rails framework and would like to help us work on our backlog of issues and enhancement requests, please follow the steps below to get involved.

1. If you want to contribute a new enhancement, please follow the instructions above to Share your ideas.
2. Assuming we weren't able to prioritize your suggestion and you want to start working on it ... or you're interested in helping us address our backlog of open bugs ... Create a fork for the DMPRoadmap/roadmap repository.
3. Clone your fork onto your local machine and follow the installation instructions to setup your environment.
4. Create a new branch for your new feature or bug fix (> git checkout -b my-feature)
5. Make your changes, commit them, and then push them up to Github.
6. Add the appropriate tests or adjust existing tests if necessary.
7. Create a pull request in GitHub from your branch to the 'development' branch of the DMPRoadmap/roadmap repository.
8. The project team will review your changes and provide feedback.

Please see the developer guide for further details on contributing to the project.

6) Improve documentation

All of the documentation for the DMP Roadmap project can be found on our Wiki. If you discover that something is missing or if any of the documentation appears to be incorrect or out of date, please let us know.

For corrections or new contributions, please submit a new [GitHub Issue](GitHub Issues) and be sure to use the 'documentation' label to help us categorize and identify the problem. If you're providing new documentation please note that your content is new and where it should appear within the Wiki. Specify the URL of the Wiki page that the correction applies to if possible.