Skip to content

Contributor guide

Great to see you here - we would be delighted to have you join our team! So if you are interested, just read on for information on how to contribute.

If you don't know what ELIXIR Cloud & AAI is all about, follow the link or check out these documentation pages. Otherwise, please read on to find out more about the general topics you can help us with, our core values, what we can offer you and what we expect from contributors.

One-time contributors

If you are a seasoned FOSS contributor and you just want to work on a single issue, you may want to jump directly to the contribution guidelines section.

Key topics

Here is a list of broad topics and challenges that you can address while working with us:

  • Aid the development of consensus-driven community standards for the ethical, secure and efficient sharing and analysis of sensitive data together with international partners in big and small public and private organizations
  • Help to develop high-quality, scalable, secure, cloud native web applications that implement these standards, with the goal of enabling thousands of professional users in academia, the public healthcare sector and industry to analyze sensitive data in a federated cloud environment
  • Support the production-grade, containerized deployment of these services on modern infrastructure in private, public, hybrid and multicloud settings
  • Help design and implement the security features governing the services individually and in combination, including the flow of authentication and authorization according to community standards

Our values

Here are some of the core values of the project and the team:

Openness

All of our code is open source, generally from day one, and available publicly under a license approved by the Open Source Initiative

FAIRness

We are committed to making data, software and infrastructure findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable

Privacy & Security

We believe that sensitive personal data should be under the control of the individual and should be shared, processed and analyzed only upon and to the degree covered by informed and specific consent, using the highest security standards

Our offer

We offer you

  • to work with us in a thriving and welcoming international community of experts with diverse technical and cultural backgrounds
  • the opportunity to tackle modern, highly relevant technical challenges on the way to personalized medicine and genome-scale analytics in the cloud
  • support, feedback and appreciation for your work, as well as involvment in and influence on policy decisions proportional to the level of your engagement
  • networking opportunities within the ELIXIR and GA4GH communities, with many opinion leaders in academia and the tech industry

Regular contributors

Check out the additional exiciting opportunities for regular contributors!

Our expectations

If all of that sounds tempting and you are still interested to contribute, we would only expect you to please

  • respect our Code of Conduct
  • make an effort to adhere to good coding practices and our [contribution guidelines] (we will of course help you with that!)
  • communicate clearly and openly with us with regard to any issues that you take responsibility for, especially if you realize that you cannot or do not want to continue with something (which is of course totally fine!)

Opportunities

For regular contributors, we offer a number of exciting opportunities, such as the chance of participating in GSOC, attending a hackathon or securing a paid internship with us. Please read on for more details on each of these.

Letters of Recommendation

If you have worked with us for at least 12 weeks full-time equivalent (GSoC, internship or otherwise), we will be happy to provide you with a letter of recommendation.

Google Summer of Code

Since 2019, we have been participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) image/svg+xml , as part of the GA4GH mentor organization. You can reach out to us about GSoC at any time, however, to be able to join in any given year, you should do so at the latest when the host organization and projects are announced early in the calendar year (check the official timeline for the exact date).

So far we had the immense pleasure to mentor the following excellent people during their GSoC stints (follow the links to find out more about the projects they were working on):

Year Contributor Project
2019 Vani Singh Task Distribution Logic for GA4GH Cloud APIs
2020 Sartah Gupta Dynamically adding data to DRS
2021 Akash Saini Brokering Continuous Delivery through the ELIXIR Cloud service registry
2021 Anurag Gupta Implement reusable GA4GH UI clients
2021 Vipul Chhabra Implement GA4GH TES in Galaxy/Pulsar
2022 Ayush Kumar Federating workflow execution using GA4GH Cloud APIs
2022 Lakshya Garg Compliance testing framework for the Task Execution Service API
2022 Suyash Gupta TES Callback endpoint and mechanism in TESK
2023 Assel Abzalova Web Components for discovering and using scientific software in the Cloud
2023 Javed Habib Dashboard Web Components (React, Vue etc) for Workflow and Task Runs
2023 Lakshya Garg Common compliance testing framework for every OpenAPI specification

Hackathons

We regularly lead ELIXIR Cloud & AAI-related projects at various (bio)hackathons. These are always fun events and often a highlight of the year! Check our news page for any upcoming events. If you are interested in attending a hackathon, please reach out to us. In some cases, we may be able to procure funding for contributors.

Here is a list of hackathons we have attended in the past:

Internships

We offer regular high-quality contributors the opportunity of doing paid, open-ended, highly flexible "freelancing" internships with us, with an hourly rate roughly based on GSoC stipends. We will reach out to you if we feel that you qualify.