Contribute to Epinowcast

We strongly believe that the challenges we face in the real-time analysis of infectious disease can only be overcome as a community.

We can only function with contributions from our members. No matter your skills or background contributions are welome.

Take part in community discussions

The easiest way to be involved is to show up to community meetings, join in community discussions, for example questions related to user experiences, ask questions, and let others know if you are working on similar problems. Join community.epinowcast.org to get started.

Answer questions

The next step is consider answering questions related to your expertise. This could be helping out with using our tools or it could be domain expertise you can share with others. Remeber we are a caring community and some people asking questions may not know best practices. Try to be friendly and considerate. If you think it might help consider pointing new question askers to our help page.

File issues

If you’ve found a bug, first create a minimal reprex. Make sure to spend time making it as easy to understand as possible. Then file it on the GitHub repository for the package.

Contribute documentation

If you are a bit more experienced, and ready to make pull requests then expanding or improving our documentation is very helpful. The key to adding documentation is that we use the roxygen2 package when documenting R code. This means that documentation is found alongside the R code and there are some special tags.

Contribute code

If you are more experienced, you might want to help with package development. The first step to making code contributions is to make an issue or comment on the issue you plan to address. When implementing your contribution remember to follow the package conventions.

Contribute methodology

As a research community, we are interested in improving the underlying basis of our tools and methods. If you have a suggestion for a methodological improvement, or an extension please share it with our community as a project proposal.

Contribute evaluations and case studies

Our tools and methods are designed to be flexible. We don’t know what the best models are for different types of question. If you have an evaluation of our methods or a case study implementing them we would be keen to see them and this will likely help others as well as informing future developments. Share these with our community here and here.

Contribute alternatives

The landscape of real-time infectious disease modelling is wide and we don’t have all the answers. If you come across a method or tool that answers similar questions to those we target, you think will interest our community, or that is just in scope and you’d like to discuss please share it here. If we get sufficient interest we are also keen on building a resource section to point communnity members to alternatives and other other resources they may find useful. If interested in taking this forward post here with ideas.