Are you a scientist, researcher, data wrangler, or language maestro? Harmony needs YOU! We’re always looking for talented individuals to join our team.
Participating in an open source project can be very rewarding. Read more about it here!
Please familiarise yourself with Git. You can fork Harmony and make a pull request any time! We’re glad to have your contribution.
Video of our orientation session on how to contribute to Harmony.
First, do a quick search to see if the issue has already been reported. If so, it’s often better to just leave a comment on an existing issue, rather than creating a new one. Old issues also often include helpful tips and solutions to common problems. You should also check the troubleshooting guide to see if your problem is already listed there.
If you’re looking for help with your code, consider posting a question on the GitHub Discussions board. Please understand that we won’t be able to provide individual support via email. We also believe that help is much more valuable if it’s shared publicly, so that more people can benefit from it.
There are lots of ways you can contribute to Harmony! You can work on code, improve the API, or add code examples.
In particular, the PDF extraction (converting PDFs to structured questionnaire items) is very hard and we have a separate Github repo with examples here: https://github.com/harmonydata/pdf-questionnaire-extraction
We are planning on running a hackathon focused on this aspect of the tool.
Also, other initiatives that could be really useful include:
We started to make a new repo with training data to improve the PDF data processing. This repo has manually annotated training data: https://github.com/harmonydata/pdf-questionnaire-extraction
One issue that would be really helpful would be, to handle active and passive voice, such as “child is bullied” vs “child bullies others” - these are harmonised as close together whereas they should be far apart.
Maybe a small task is easier to start with. Can you see any obvious bugs that you’d like to pick up?
We’ve been looking at integrations with other data repositories. One way forward is to make an npm package other sites can install that makes it easy for them to send data over to the app. Or possibly just to interact with the API directly.
The issue list is in the Github repository. You can view the open issues, pick one to fix, or raise your own issue. Even if you’re not a coder, feel free to raise an issue.
Harmony is mostly coded in Python. We use Pycharm IDE by JetBrains. Please ensure you are familiar with Python, HuggingFace, and FastAPI, or Javascript and React if you want to work on the front end.
Please make sure all code you commit is linted using the Pycharm default linter. If you use a different one (such as VS Code’s linter, or pylint), this will make the code history hard to follow, so please be consistent.
Harmony uses the pytest framework for testing. For more info on this, see the pytest documentation. To be interpreted and run, all test files and test functions need to be prefixed with test_.
The Harmony Python library https://github.com/harmonydata/harmony is the core Harmony functionality. Most of the logic is in this repo. This repo has unit tests which run automatically on commits to main.
However, the Harmony API repo https://github.com/harmonydata/harmonyapi uses the Harmony Python library as a submodule. When you update the Python library, please run the unit tests and integration tests in the API repo to check nothing is broken - including the Selenium tests which test the browser app end to end. You will need to install Selenium to run the tests.
Since the API repo includes the Python library as a submodule, when you update the Python library, you will need to update the submodule (in the harmonyapi repo, cd into the submodule folder and do git pull, then cd out and do git add, commit and push). We recommend you familiarise yourself with Git submodules.
Finally, the app repo https://github.com/harmonydata/app is the React front end. Please check you can run this repo locally also before you start contributing. To point the front end repo to a local copy of your API repo, please change the file .env to point to http://localhost:8000.
If you’d like to contribute to this project, you can contact us at https://harmonydata.ac.uk/ or make a pull request on our Github repository. You can also raise an issue.
The Harmony Hackathon Come and join us for a day of coding, collaboration, and creativity at the Harmony Hackathon! Whether you’re a seasoned programmer or just starting out, this event is perfect for anyone interested in tech and innovation. You can sign up on Eventbrite! The Hackathon event will be held at Chandler House (UCL), providing a vibrant and inspiring atmosphere for all participants. Get ready to work on exciting projects, learn new skills, and connect with like-minded individuals.
How to Harmonise Questionnaires - 10 Practical Steps (+ 1 Bonus Tip) Data privacy is a big challenge today. It’s all about what we share and what we don’t. Zoher Karu said it well: “One of the biggest challenges is around data privacy and what is shared versus what is not shared. And my perspective on that is consumers are willing to share if there’s value returned. One-way sharing is not going to fly anymore.
