Packages
For all pharmaverse packages we recommend to use the following for support and communications between user and developer communities:
Slack - for informal discussions, Q&A and building user community
GitHub Issues - for direct feedback, enhancement requests or raising bugs
Here’s our guidance when using these to ensure support is managed in a consistent way across packages:
| Package Developer Guidance | User Guidance | Naming Conventions |
|---|---|---|
| Join pharmaverse.slack.com using link and set up an open channel for your package and set up notifications. You may also wish to set-up private channels here for other purposes such as only for development or testing teams | Join pharmaverse.slack.com using link and the channels of any package you are using and set up notifications | Slack user channel: use package name, e.g. admiral; Dev team: add “_dev”, e.g. admiral_dev; Testing team: add “_testing”, e.g. admiral_testing |
| Ensure package GitHub repos are open for users to raise issues, then monitor and respond. If changes will not be made add an explanation as to why. If you think someone from the user community could help with an issue then tag as per the naming convention | Include as much detail as possible when raising a GitHub issue in a package repo to help the development team understand. If the package allows for contributions (look out for the naming convention tags) consider offering to help make the fix | Tags of “help wanted” or “good first issue” for those GitHub issues open for collaboration |
We prefer these tools are all used in the public setting (rather than using internal company-specific versions) so that support is not limited to any one company, in the spirit of the open source vision of pharmaverse. However, all must remember no patient level data or company sensitive information should be shared via any of these open public channels. Admittedly, this does make it more difficult to share a minimally reproducible example which usually facilitates quicker issue resolution, but the code could still be shared with an explanation of the data scenario causing the issue. We believe this is a relatively small price to pay for the greater benefits of increased industry collaboration.
Using a consistent support model will allow users to have a similar experience from package to package, thus increasing confidence in the individual packages and the collective as a whole. Most importantly though, it will foster natural user communities to form where support no longer needs to come only from developers, as users from any background can help each other.
The onus is always on the developers to encourage the community to grow by ensuring that the support system is working. As if for example, a user posts a question to Slack or requests an enhancement via a GitHub issue and it gets no response, then this is not going to instil trust for them and other users to want to engage with this package in future.
General
If you need any support around pharmaverse itself in general then you can use the “general” channel in our Slack.
Otherwise, please reach out directly to one of our council reps via the contact details listed at the bottom section of the front page of our website.
Code of Conduct
In all of our communication and support channels, please follow the Slack community code of conduct. If anyone is in violation of this code or in any way deemed to be acting against the good intentions of pharmaverse, then the council reps may take action to remove individuals from community channels.