Values and principles

Any human creation is influenced by our values and perspectives of the world around us. We can let these values guide us in our work on Seedcase Project unconsciously and implicitly, without examining, critiquing, and evaluating them, or we can explicitly and consciously select, describe, and explain the values we want to be guided by.

We want to be explicit and conscious about what, how, and importantly, why we are doing what we decide to do. Being explicit will also help focus our work and (hopefully) make us more efficient and effective.

The values and principles of the Seedcase Project are ever evolving and we will update and refine them as we learn and grow.

Values

Specific values:

  • How we work is as important as what we make or do
  • Work that is visible and open is easier to participate in and contribute to
  • High quality code itself is as valuable as working software
  • Working software without documentation is not as useful without documentation
  • Inclusive and accessible design make software and documentation more usable and impactful
  • Openness and transparency lead to better collaboration and products
  • Prescriptive methods are easier to use than descriptive ones1

Principles

We follow these specific principles that are influenced by our values. We will:

  • document as many processes and activities as we are able to by following a documentation-first approach
  • work and communicate openly (though privately where necessary)
  • use open licenses for all our outputs
  • design documentation, training material, and software with non-technical people in mind
  • incorporate accessibility and inclusive design in both our software and documentation outputs
  • use established standards and practices where possible and as appropriate
  • follow FAIR principles for data and software
  • use modern, newer tools even when they aren’t widely used, as long as there is a strong rationale
  • develop our outputs for health research, but aim for it to be usable and useful for other domains as well
  • build and design software and its documentation to follow conventions rather than configurations

Footnotes

  1. An example of a descriptive approach would be describing how to create a folder structure for a project and possibles names for files while a prescriptive approach would be giving a template folder structure that one uses and follows.↩︎