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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to the DISPLACE Scientific Research software development

Welcome!

First of all, you might refresh yourself with some general guidelines when contributing to an open source project :-)

Our Mission: A Robust Scientific Research Software

We are a bunch of scientists willing to aid policy decisions with some support and knowledge anticipating possible effects of policy options on the impacted marine sectors that exploit marine natural resources. We initially started developing this platform by taking the angle of the fisheries with the final aim to contribute to sustainable use of our seas. Of course, contributors from other sectors could be interested in developing other aspects that would acknowledge the diversity of viewpoints under the same present platform. Our specificity in our approach is to account for the spatial dimension in numerical ecology, a feature that is often ignored given the complication it adds to mapping resources, describing different types of exploitation and their interrelated changes over time. Where to put things (we mean: fishing, windmill farms, fish farms, artificial reefs, spatial closure for fishing etc.) is however an obvious problem to look at!

Why your contribution can make a difference?

Because scientists are not professional software developers, we obviously lack experience or knowledge about how best developing such a tool in practice. Because professional software developers are generally not committed to developing such scientific softwares, and especially natural resource management softwares, the ideal world would then merge the scientist skills to the software developer skills to develop a robust and useful platform together. You, as a open-minded open source contributor would therefore be enormously helpful in case you take from your spare time, for example, to help improving the documentation, spotting obvious code bottlenecks, develop some basic unit testing, help harmonizing the coding style, or more broadly help identifying some misconceptions that would lock us in a suboptimal software solution. We thank you very much for your time and we will certainly welcome your suggestions and pull requests!