Community

How to Contribute

There are many ways to get involved in the Clowder community. Below we have identified a few ways and pointers to get started. The easiest way to get more information is to join us on Slack. Before participating, please take a momente to read our Code of Conduct.

Depending on your brackground and skill set there are many ways in which you can contribute the Clowder framework.

• If you are a software engineer:
  • You can help scientists and researchers by wrapping their code into new extractors, visualizations, or create special purpose clients
  • You can contribute to the Clowder core infrastructure
• If you are scientist or researcher:
  • You can share your code and ask for help to embed it as a Clowder extractor or tool
  • You can share the challenges your community encounters when dealing with data so that we can try to make Clowder better support your community
• If you are data scientist:
  • You can develop new extractors
  • You can develop new visualizations
• If you are a technical writer:
  • You can help us improve existing documentation
• If you are a designer:
  • You can help us improve the UI and UX of the Clowder web frontend or Clowder mobile app
• If you are a student in any of the above areas:
  • Please join Slack and ask how you can help. You will be assigned a mentor that will support you. They will help you find a good match between your skills and potential areas to contribute to.
  • If you are a software developer take a look at the good first issues in GitHub

Ready to dive in? Following is more specific information on how to contribute to specific aspects of the framework.

Contributing to the Core

To contribute to the inner workings of the frameworks, a basic familiarity with the framework and the technologies used is required. The type of technical knowledge required varies greatly depending on what aspect of the system you want to modify. It is always a good idea to ask in Slack for pointers and make sure the proposed changes are inline with current practices and future developments.

• Read our contribuiting document
• Propose improvements on the wiki or in GitHub
• Make sure you have a basic understanding of
  • the overall architecture
  • web app development (MVC, HTML, HTTP, Javascript)
  • the Scala programming language
  • MongoDB if you will be modifying what is stored in the database
  • If you will be working with the extraction bus, basic knowledge of RabbitMQ is required
  • For text search functionality, we use ElasticSearch

Creating New Extractors

Existing analytics code can be wrapped into a Clowder extractor using basic Python.

• Step by step guide
• Webinar 1, Webinar 2

Creating New Visualizations

Dataset and file visualizations can be created using plain Javascript.

• Webinar

Creating New Clients

Thanks to an extensive web API, special purpose clients can be created in any programming language or framework.

• API documentation
• Example clients: phone app, bootstrap client