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People

The Cytomining ecosystem is maintained by a distributed community of contributors across academia and industry.

Contributors #

We welcome issues, bug reports, documentation improvements, and pull requests from the broader community.

Governance #

Cytomining uses a lightweight governance model centered on maintainers and public decision-making. We keep policy concise and transparent.

  • Stewardship: Repositories are maintained by designated maintainers in the Cytomining organization.
  • Decision-making: Day-to-day technical decisions happen in public issues, pull requests, and our public Discord.
  • Consensus first: Maintainers seek rough consensus from active contributors before merging impactful changes.
  • Escalation path: When consensus is unclear, maintainers make a final call, document rationale, and revisit with new evidence.
  • Scope and ownership: Changes are reviewed by maintainers closest to the affected project area, as defined by recent commits and other relevant ecosystem initiatives.
  • Openness: Design direction, roadmap changes, and tradeoffs are discussed in public whenever possible.
  • Evolution: Governance expectations are updated incrementally as the community and project complexity grow.

This reflects how the organization operates today and is intentionally compact so contributors can understand how decisions get made without navigating a large policy surface.

Organizational structure #

The Cytomining ecosystem currently spans two GitHub organizations with distinct roles.

The cytomining organization hosts production-ready tools that have reached stable APIs, published documentation, test coverage, and community adoption. Tools here are maintained collaboratively by contributors from the Way Lab at the University of Colorado Anschutz and the broader image-based profiling community.

The WayScience organization serves as an incubator for next-generation tools under active development. It is the primary home for roadmap work: tools here are experimental, may have unstable APIs, and have not yet graduated into Cytomining.

The two organizations are complementary. WayScience is where new ideas are prototyped and validated; Cytomining is where they become community infrastructure. Core production tools ( Pycytominer, CytoTable, coSMicQC, copairs, DeepProfiler, CytoDataFrame) live in Cytomining. Roadmap tools ( buscar, OME-arrow, iceberg-bioimage, ZEDprofiler) live in WayScience until they are ready to graduate.

Graduation process #

A tool is considered ready to migrate from WayScience (or any other repository from other organizations) into Cytomining when it meets the following criteria:

  • Within scope — the tool must be purpose-built for scientists who perform image-based profiling.
  • Stable API — no breaking changes anticipated in the near term; a versioned release has been tagged
  • Documentation — a published documentation site covering installation, usage, and API reference
  • Test coverage — a CI-passing test suite with meaningful coverage (>80%) of core functionality
  • Publication or preprint — a citable reference describing the tool’s design and validation

Code of Conduct #

Participation in Cytomining spaces is expected to follow the organization-wide Code of Conduct:

All contributors and community members are expected to uphold a respectful, inclusive, and professional environment.

Security Stance #

We take security seriously across our software and community operations.

  • Cytomining Organization Security Policy
  • If you discover a potential vulnerability, please report it responsibly through GitHub security reporting mechanisms where available
  • Avoid opening public issues for unpatched security vulnerabilities
  • We aim to triage and respond to credible reports quickly and transparently

For repository-specific security guidance, check each project’s SECURITY.md (when present) and GitHub Security tabs.