After some time in the making, we're happy to share The Guide to the RSpace Project — a community resource that brings together everything you need to understand, contribute to, and engage with the RSpace open source project.

The Guide covers how to contribute code, documentation, UX research, and integrations; how decisions get made; how to find your footing as a first-time contributor; and how to get in touch with the team. It lives in our community repository on GitHub, alongside our office hours archive, UX research, and community project listings.

Why now?

Building a welcoming, well-documented open source community takes deliberate effort — and we've had some good help along the way. Together with many other fantastic open science projects, RSpace was part of the inaugural cohort of the Birdaro training program, a 12-week leadership development program for open-source project teams run by the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) and funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Birdaro helped us think more carefully about the "why" behind our community — who we're trying to reach, what we want contributors to experience, and how to communicate our shared purpose clearly.

The Guide is one direct outcome of that work.

A starting point

The Guide is hosted on GitHub and modularly designed to facilitate efficient maintenance and community contribution. We kept it intentionally concise as we wanted to get something useful out now rather than wait for something exhaustive. Some areas, like design principles, architecture documentation, and deeper contribution paths, are still to come, and we're planning to develop those together with the community over time.

If something's missing that would have helped you or if anything is unclear, that's exactly the feedback we want.

Get involved

If you're a researcher, developer, or institution interested in contributing to or building on RSpace, the Guide is the place to start.

Explore The Guide to the RSpace Project →