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Contributing to MInAS

Summary

The primary method for contributing to the MInAS project is through Feedback Sessions. These sessions are designed to gather input from the community on the proposed metadata standard.

Enthusiastic and committed volunteers can also join the development team, that is responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of the metadata schema and checklists, including aggregating the feedback from feedback sessions and producing tooling and documentation.

A feedback session is an occasional 3h online meeting that contributors are invited to attend. We encourage members of the same group or lab to attend via the same connection (e.g. from the same seminar room)

Prior the session, contributors are asked to prepare a sample and data description of samples and data they are familiar with, whether this is already published data, their own unpublished data, or the samples from their favourite ancient DNA paper.

Note

Sample and data descriptions do not need to be shared with the developer team - they are purely for the contributors to use as their own reference during the session.

The session itself has three parts:

  1. Introduction presentation and task brief
  2. Testing of the schema and checklists
  3. Feedback and discussion round table

In the first part, the member of the developer team who is running the session will give a brief introduction to the motivation MInAS project, what the MInAS checklists are, the task, and gives a brief demo of the interfaces that will be used.

Afterwards, contributors will be ask to 'translate' or transfer the information form their pre-prepared sample and data descriptions into the MInAS DataHarmonizer interface with the particular checklist that is relevant to their samples. While filling in the data, contributors are asked to record on their feedback - both positive on negative - on the proposed metadata terms, for example what critical metadata are not included, what descriptions or structure does not work for them etc.

This can either be done individually, or in small groups as per the wish of the researcher. Contributors who are giving feedback with their entire lab or research group are encouraged to form consensus feedback from the groups opinions before giving passing it back to the developer team in the third part.

Finally, the session will end with the round table discussion where the developer team will ask the contributors to give their feedback and encourage cross-group discussions and consensus on the feedback to ensure proposed changes are as applicable to as many research groups and areas as possible.

Once the feedback session is over, the developer team will contact everyone who gave specific feedback to add them to the contributor list, and ask if they would be included as a co-author on eventual MInAS publications.

Contributors may be contacted again in the future for further feedback on later versions of MInAS.

Developers have three main roles in the MInAS project:

  1. Host feedback sessions to gather community feedback
  2. Attend monthly development meetings for project planning
  3. Aggregate and clean the feedback from the feedback sessions

In feedback sessions, developers are responsible for organising times and locations of the session, giving introductory presentations, training contributors on how to use the MInAS DataHarmonizer interface, answering questions, and chairing the feedback and discussion round table. After the sessions, they cleanup the feedback into standardised tables in preparation for 'Development workshops'. See the Contributor section for more details on the feedback sessions.

In the monthly development meetings, developers contribute to the planning of the next feedback sessions, helping guide the longer-term direction of the project, solving any issues that have arisen during feedback decisions. Developers also help design new methods of gathering feedback and generally help to ensure MInAS keeps up to date with addressing the needs of the palaeogenomics community.

In one day online Development workshops, developers are split off into groups to look through the aggregated feedback from the feedback sessions, and to discuss and make consensus decisions. These decisions are then processed by the coordinators for incorporation into the main MInAS schema.

Developer team members with good command line and coding skills are also welcome to assist in the development of the tools and infrastructure used by the MInAS project.