Community Guidelines¶

or How We Work (Together)¶

Work behind clij is a community effort. Contributions like feedback, suggestions, code and testing are very welcome.

The clij project is maintained and lead by the benevolent dictator @haesleinhuepf. If you want to contribute or even become part of the decision making process, just get involved. Everyone is welcome who supports the major aims listed below.

Discussions, support and feedback are best communicated via image.sc/tags/clij

Major aims

Major aim of the clij library is providing accelerated algorithms for bio-image analysis to a community with little to no coding skills. Even though clij uses the programming language OpenCL to communicate with graphics processing units (GPUs), the end-users should not need to learn this language.

To keep a long story short:

• We aim crafting an easily accessible image processing library.
• We aim making image processing accessible for
  • beginners and experts,
  • users from various disciplines (biology, medicine, physics, computer science)
  • users of any major operating system and
  • owners of any major CPU and GPU hardware.
• We aim writing easy to read, maintain and extend code.
• We aim documenting our platform in an easily accessible way.
• We aim forming a community where users and developers make decisions together.

In order to achieve these aims, contributions of any kind should fulfill these conditions:

• Easy to read, understand, maintain and extend code
• Well documented and explained functionality
• Simple examples of individual functions
• Complex examples relevant for biology / microscopy
• Feedback leading to an easier to use / maintain / learn / teach clij

There is no must. There are no coding rules. Academic anarchy to give freedom to developers and contributors. But keep in mind: At the end, everything related to clij should be simple.

Developing clij plugins

If you want to get started and make your first clij plugin, it is recommended to clone this repository and read its documentation. When your plugin runs nicely, you can distribute it yourself as independent clij plugin, or you can get in touch and we’ll see how to incorporate it.

Long-term support and maintenance

In order to achieve long-term reliable and reproducible workflows built on the basis of clij, we defined an annual release cycle and aim for backwards-compatibility.

Future releases

After clij released in summer 2019 and clij2 released in summer 2020, the next evolutionary step is clEsperanto, potentially released in summer 2022. Excited? Get in touch.

Happy clijing!