Governance

How decisions get made in the malariaverse

Note

This is a maintainer-facing page, sitting across all three maintainer pillars. It records sensible defaults for a small research group — not a formal process. When in doubt, talk to people; don’t reach for a procedure.

The malariaverse is maintained by a small academic group, and decisions are made by discussion rather than by formal committee. The notes below just make the defaults explicit so nothing falls through the cracks at handover.

Roles

  • Package maintainers — each package has at least one named maintainer (the Maintainer field in its DESCRIPTION). They own day-to-day changes, reviews, and releases for that package.
  • Group lead — the academic lead for the malaria modelling group, who acts as the overall steward of the suite and the tie-breaker for cross-package decisions.

Adding a package to the malariaverse

  • Anyone in the group can propose a new package; it joins the suite with the group lead’s sign-off.
  • It must meet the minimum bar (passing CI, tests, a pkgdown site, a hex logo, a repostatus badge) and have a card added to the home page.
  • Prefer small, single-purpose packages that communicate through data over adding scope to an existing one — this is what keeps the suite loosely coupled.

Signing off a cross-package breaking change

  • A change that breaks another package is agreed between the maintainers of the affected packages, with the group lead as tie-breaker.
  • It is then carried out and announced using the process on the Versioning & releases page (coordinate across repos → cut a malariaverse_<MM_YYYY> snapshot tag → publish a Latest changes note → email the user list).
  • The bar is simply: don’t surprise downstream users or maintainers. Announce first, release second.

Coordinating releases

Individual packages release on their own schedule. When several must move together, they are pinned with a shared malariaverse_<MM_YYYY> git tag so a known-good combination can always be reinstalled — see Versioning & releases.

Stewardship & contact

  • General contact and the breaking-change announcement list: malariaverse@imperial.ac.uk.
  • Bugs and feature requests: the Issues page of the relevant package (see More information).