Overview of the NWChemEx Community

Not everyone uses NWChemEx in the same way. Some people simply want to run computations. Others want to add new features. To help disambiguate among common use cases for NWChemEx, the community has established what we call “roles.” The roles are:

• community member,
• developer, and
• author.

It helps to think of the roles as being nested like:

The idea is that authors are a subset of the developers and the developers are a subset of the community members.

Community members are the easiest to define. Community members are anyone who interacts with NWChemEx in any manner whatsoever. Whether you are contributing intricate algorithms to the code base, running calculations, or just perusing the source code, consider yourself a member of the community! Developers are the subset of the community members who create software that in some shape or form interacts with NWChemEx. It doesn’t matter if that software sits on top of NWChemEx, is a plugin for NWChemEx, or if that code is in an intricate part of NWChemEx’s infrastructure, by interacting with NWChemEx on a code-level, you are a developer! Authors are developers who contribute to the source-code repositories owned by the NWChemEx organization.

Ultimately, the team introduced roles to help distinguish among target users. Documentation, tutorials, and features targeting community members are the most general. They are of interest to almost anyone interacting with NWChemEx. Similarly, documentation, tutorials, and features targeting developers will be of interest to anyone writing software that interacts with NWChemEx; however, community members who are not developers will generally speaking not find such topics relevant. Finally, documentation, tutorials, and features targeting authors is unlikely to be of interest to community members who do not fall under the author label.

FAQs

Is writing “X” sufficient for being labeled a developer (or author)?

Yes, if you want it to be. The community places no restrictions on how large a contribution needs to be. Honestly, we’re fine if you want to consider yourself an author without ever having written a single line of code. The roles exist not to exclude people, but to categorize information.

What if I don’t want to be a community member, developer, or author?

That’s fine. Similar to the answer from the previous question, you are free to refer to yourself with whatever role you would like. You are also free to not use the roles either.

Can I use the member, developer, author badge to promote my role?

Absolutely! The badges, i.e., these things:

are designed to be put in slide decks or on personal websites for this very reason. Generally speaking, you’re free to use these badges however you like.

The caveat here is the usual Government sponsor language, i.e., the use of the logos can not be used in a way that implies/suggests endorsement, support, etc. from the Department of Energy, the United States Government, or any other NWChemEx sponsor (unless of course you actually have such an endorsement).