Join theNiPreps Community¶

One of the pillars offMRIPrep, the seed project forNiPreps,has been nurturing an open-source community.Building Welcoming Communitiesis crucial for open-source software because of several reasons:

• Engaging users andcontributors (in a very liberal sense, not just with code) helps establish a development road-map:

  • In the case offMRIPrep, many users have reported bugs via our issue tracker andNeurostars.org. Even though testing is one of the primary focuses forfMRIPrep, without these bug-report contributions the tool would have never reached the dependability level it requires to serve its purpose.
  • Users identify and propose new features, often illuminating shady areas the most involved developers did not find time or the right context to explore.

• The community exposes the software and also increases the externality of the software. The neuroimaging discussion supported byNeurostars.org has been a key factor for the adoption offMRIPrep.

• Users always give back, and it is not uncommon to see elaborate responses to bug-reports and questions aboutfMRIPrep onNeurostars.org by users who had similar questions previously.

Because of the scientific purpose ofNiPreps, there is one morefundamentalreason to grow a (scientific) community around the tools:rigor/scrutiny.As one reviews a few of the most discussed pull-requests tofMRIPrep, very soonthey realize that we don't just need to get the code right.We strive for integrating high-quality code, but even more importantly, that codemust get the scientific method it implements right.This is particularly difficult because in most of the cases there aren'ttest oracles (in software engineering terms) or gold-standards (in scientific terms)to efficiently evaluate the validity of new features (even to exercise a minuscule areaof the domain of inputs).The redundancy of expert eyes looking at our code has only helped make it better.

Current members of the GitHub organization¶

A total of 100 neuroimagers have already joined us.Becoming a member will give you access to additional forums for discussion, subscribing notifications for events and meetings, etc.You can request you are added to the organization bycreating a new issue here.