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Help make BIDS better!

Call for joining the BIDS maintainers team

We are currently actively looking for motivated people to join the BIDS maintainers team. Please see in the section below what being a BIDS maintainer means and reach out if you'd like to join!

BIDS is informed, supported, and guided by its users. BIDS standards are intended to change and evolve as methods, resources, and the needs of the BIDS community changes. We encourage all researchers to contribute to the ongoing development of BIDS standards, be it through discussion on websites, the creation of new BIDS tools, or contributing to extending the BIDS specification through proposals. Below is a list of common resources where users can get involved in making the BIDS standard better!

Questions and issues

Neurostars Website

  • The easiest way to contribute to BIDS is to ask questions you have about the specification on Neurostars.

  • If your question has a bids tag it will be much easier for others to find the answer.

  • You can also get involved by answering questions on Neurostars!

Github Issues

Become a part of the BIDS Community

There are so many ways to help us build this community.

  • You could help someone else learn the benefits of BIDS by giving a talk in your local organization
  • Or you could work on building a BIDS App!

The only requirement is that everyone who contributes adheres to our BIDS Code of Conduct.

Thank you for your contributions!

Extending the BIDS specification

The BIDS specification can be extended in a backwards compatible way and will evolve over time. These are accomplished with BIDS Extension Proposals (BEPs), which are community-driven processes.

Do you want to learn more about extending BIDS to a new modality or set of data types? Read the Guide and follow the Submission Process. Read the BEP Process and follow the BEP Guidelines

Becoming a BIDS maintainer

Why become a maintainer?

As a BIDS maintainer you may get the chance to:

  • Learn to work as a team
  • Bring your expertise to the BIDS maintainers group and cover technical blind spots it may have
  • Improving your technical writing skills (for example documentation)
  • Learn to work with continuous integration and deployment
  • Advise and participate in the development of BIDS extensions that are most commonly associated with a publication
Responsibilities
  • Maintainers need to be loosely aware of the entire project and use their knowledge to facilitate and initiate interactions between different nodes of the project and determine a reasonable and timely order for features to be added and issues to be resolved.
  • Maintainers direct other BIDS contributors in reviewing PRs, writing clarifications to the specification, or other contributions.
  • Maintainers ensure that all contributors maintain a friendly and welcoming tone to encourage productive conversations.
  • If no work team is suitable or available, the final responsibility of getting the work done lies with the maintainers.
  • The development of each BIDS extension proposal should be "followed" by at least one maintainer who acts as a preferential point of contact between the BIDS maintainers and the BEP leads.

Apart from these abstract and general responsibilities, maintainers within the BIDS community also need to ensure that the following tasks get done:

  • Keeping the Contributors wiki up to date and assisting new contributors with adding their credits, and performing community inquiries to ensure contributors are credited in the Contributors appendix
    • Deciding what constitutes a contribution worth adding to the "Contributors list"
  • Preparing a monthly report to the BIDS Steering Group. The monthly report is in the form of milestones, issues addressed, and open issues raised in the past month and goals/plans for the next month. The BIDS Steering Group may ask for additional information or propose a meeting to further discuss report items. The report format and meetings are at the discretion of the BIDS Steering Group.

Maintainers are not expected to individually be responsible for all the responsibilities listed. Rather, the responsibilities are distributed amongst the entire group.

Organization
  • The group of maintainers are a group of people with the above mentioned responsibilities, who commit to convene bi-weekly meetings to discuss the project.
  • One lead maintainer represents the group to other BIDS Groups, mediates disagreement among members, and casts deciding votes when needed (tie break). Note that the maintainers will always strive for consensus decision making, and will try to avoid resorting to voting.
    • The lead maintainer may delegate any of their duties to another maintainer.
    • The lead maintainer is appointed collectively by the group of maintainers, preferably through consensus.
    • If no one else does, the lead maintainer sets the schedule for the maintainers meeting.
  • Additions to and departures from the group are negotiated collectively between the lead maintainer and the new/departing members, as they involve the redistribution of duties.
    • If a maintainer wishes to serve for a limited term, that can be arranged at the start. Otherwise, due notice is expected.
    • See also "How to become a maintainer?" below
How to become a maintainer?

If you are interested in becoming a BIDS maintainer, please get in contact with an active BIDS maintainer (for example via opening a GitHub issue on bids-standard/bids-specification and tagging @bids-standard/maintainers). In that initial contact, it would be great if you could outline previous experience with BIDS (if any) and your motivation to become a maintainer, as well as particular interests for work that you would like to do. The BIDS maintainers will then invite you to one of the biweekly maintainers meetings (online) to discuss further steps and point you to the onboarding documentation (things to do).

We would be happy to hear from you!