What to Contribute: Content for Better Scientific Software

We want and need contributions to the BSSw site from the community. If you have experience or expertise that can help other scientific software teams, we encourage you to contribute an original article or point users to existing resources you find useful.

Background

The BSSw site focuses on collaborative content development on general topics related to developer productivity and software sustainability.

Developer productivity and software sustainability efforts for computational science and engineering (CSE) benefit from communicating the experiences, insights, and curated content from a broad spectrum of community members.

Types of Content

We solicit the following types of content from our readers and the community.

  • Blog: An article with original content. We welcome different types of blogs: articles sharing community happenings, experience articles (to inform the CSE community about how to improve some aspect of software productivity and sustainability) or deep dive technical articles. Brevity is appreciated; for example a blog is usually around 500--1,500 words. We will solicit contributions from thought leaders in the community and welcome proposals from anyone.

  • Curated content: Brief article that highlights other web-based content (such as tools, websites, books, organizations, etc.). Your article should describe why the CSE community might find value in the linked content.

  • Event: Brief description of an event (such as a workshop, conference, or tutorial) relevant to better scientific software.

  • If you have questions about contributing content that does not fit the above pre-defined types, please contact us using the Questions about contributions page.

Scope of Content

The exact scope of relevant content will evolve as we learn more about community interests. However, the following guidelines should be useful:

In-scope content

  • General issues in productivity and sustainability that overlap with common challenges faced in the CSE software community.
  • General tools for productivity and sustainability that can be widely used by CSE developers.
  • Characterization of challenges and solutions that may be particularly valuable to the CSE community.

Highlight connections to CSE

  • How your topic intersects with themes that are of particular interest to CSE, for example MPI, Fortran, C++, architectures, modeling and simulation.
  • Why your topic could be of particular interest to CSE.

Ease of adoption and use

  • Address how easy or hard it is to benefit from your topic.
  • Address who would be particularly interested in the topic.

Out-of-scope content

  • Narrow scope, focused on a particular CSE subcommunity.
  • Tools, processes and practices that have little in common with CSE.
  • Content that is deemed incomplete or biased, as determined by the BSSw leaders.

Does your idea seem to fit?

If you have an idea that might work, continue to the How To Contribute page.

Licensing of content you submit

By making a submission here, you agree to BSSw.io content licensing terms.