Contributor Guide
Thank you for your interest in contributing to Dataverse! We are open to contributions from everyone. We welcome contributions of ideas, bug reports, documentation, code, and more!
Ideas and Feature Requests
We would love to hear your ideas!💡
Please check if your idea or feature request is already captured in our issue tracker or roadmap.
Bring your idea to the community by posting on our Google Group or chat.dataverse.org.
To discuss privately, email us at support@dataverse.org.
Bug Reports
Before submitting an issue, please search for existing issues in our issue tracker. If there is an existing open issue that matches the issue you want to report, please add a comment to it or give it a 👍 (thumbs up).
If there is no pre-existing issue or it has been closed, please open a new issue (unless it is a security issue which should be reported privately to security@dataverse.org as discussed under Reporting Security Issues in the Installation Guide).
If you do not receive a reply to your new issue or comment in a timely manner, please ping us at chat.dataverse.org.
Documentation
Documentation is such a large topic (and important!) that we have a dedicate section on it:
Translations
If you speak multiple languages, you are very welcome to help us translate Dataverse! Please see How to Help Translate the Dataverse Software Into Your Language for details.
Code
Dataverse is open source and we love code contributions. Developers are not limited to the main Dataverse code in this git repo. We have projects in C, C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Julia, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, TypeScript and more. To get started, please see the following pages:
Usability Testing
Please email us at support@dataverse.org or fill in our feedback form if you are interested in participating in usability testing.
Answering Questions
People come along with questions on the mailing list and in chat all the time. You are very welcome to help out by answering these questions to the best of your ability.
Sample Data
Consider contributing to https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse-sample-data, a git repo of realistic-looking data that is used for testing.
Issue Triage
New issues come in all the time, especially for the main issue tracker at https://github.com/IQSS/dataverse/issues.
You can help by leaving comments. You can mention related issues or answer questions.
If you are interested in adding issue labels or related curation, please get in touch!
Giving Talks
If you give a recorded talk about Dataverse, we are happy to add it to DataverseTV. You can just leave a comment on the spreadsheet or make some noise in chat.
For non-recorded talks, we are happy to upload your slides to https://dataverse.org/presentations. Please email support@dataverse.org.
Working Groups
Most working groups are wide open to participation. For the current list of groups, please see https://www.gdcc.io/working-groups.html.
You’re welcome to start your own working group, of course. We can help you get the word out.
GDCC
The popularity of the Dataverse software has resulted in a continuously growing community with different needs and requirements. The Global Dataverse Community Consortium (GDCC) helps coordinate community efforts and sustain the software and community in the long term. Please consider contributing to GDCC by joining as an institutional member (https://www.gdcc.io/members.html).
Artwork
Surely we can put artistic talent to use. A contributor drew cartoon animals chatting about Dataverse, for example.
As annnounced, we have a sticker template you can use.
See Illustrations from The Turing Way for how that community has created artwork. Perhaps we can create a similar collection.
Other Contributions
We consulted https://opensource.guide/how-to-contribute/ but no list is comprehensive.
What else should we list here? How to YOU want to contribute to Dataverse? 🎉