Created: James Gardner, 2016-02-14
Audience: Community
Maturity: Pre-Alpha
This repository contains a set of documents that explain what we're trying to do. As they get more mature, we might publicly publish some of them on the main OpenTrials website.
Each document should be written in a format called MarkDown. MarkDown is just a plain text format that is deisgned to be very close to what you might write in a plain text email. It has a number of variants, but we'll use one called GitHub-flavoured MarkDown. If you don't know MarkDown yet, don't worry too much, we can accept contributions in other forms and one of us well just translate your document to MarkDown manually (as long as it isn't too complicated!). Or you can just start changing an existing document, and you'll probably not go too far wrong.
Each document should have a metadata section at the top that helps the person reading it understand some of the history of the document, who it is targetted at, and how mature it is.
When you first create a document it might look like this:
~~~
Created: James Gardner, 2016-02-14
Audience: Community
Maturity: Pre-Alpha
~~~
When you first update it, leave the Created information alone and add a new section Last Updated with your name and the date.
After the first revision the section might look like this:
~~~
Created: James Gardner, 2016-02-14
Last Updated: James Gardner, 2016-02-15
Audience: Community
Maturity: Pre-Alpha
~~~
After any future changes you make, just replace the Last Updated information with your name and the latest date.
Over time the maturity of the document will improve going like this:
- Planning - Ideas that might later form a document, perhaps emailed around internally
- Pre-Alpha - Perhaps a first draft, or rough ideas to be refined, probably not worth taking notice of yet unless you are an author
- Alpha - Some of this information might be accurate, let's show it to people and get some initial feedback
- Beta - We think this is getting pretty good, so we need to show people publicly for any final tweaks
- Stable - This is in use publicly and is unlikely to change very quickly now
- Inactive - We don't use this anymore
If you want to get really expert, try not to leave any spaces at the end of lines so that changes are easier to see.