Project Management

The people working on PUDL are distributed all over North America. Collaboration takes place online. We make extensive use of Github’s project management tools, as well as Zenhub <https://www.zenhub.com> which provides additional features within the context of a public facing Github project.

Issues and Project Tracking

We use Github issues to track bugs, enhancements, support requests, and just about any other work that goes into the project. The issues are organized into several different streams of work, using Github projects

We are happy to accept pull requests that improve our existing code, expand the data that’s available via PUDL, and and make our documentation more readable and complete. Feel free to report bugs, comment on existing issues, suggest other data sources that might be worth integrating, or ask questions about how to use PUDL if you can’t find the answer in our documentation.

Release Management

We are developing and releasing software, but we’re also using that software to process and publish data. Our goal is to make the data pipeline as easily and reliably replicable as possible.

Whenever we tag a release on Github, the repository is archived on Zenodo and issued a DOI. Then the package is uploaded to the Python Package Index for distribution. Our goal is to make a software release at least once a quarter.

Data releases will also be archived on Zenodo, and consist of a software release, a collection of input files, and the resulting data packages. The goal is to make the data package output reproducible given the archived input files and software release, with a single command. Our goal is to make data releases quarterly as well.

User Support

We don’t (yet) have funding to do user support, so it’s currently all community and volunteer based. In order to ensure that others can find the answers to questions that have already been asked, we try to do all support in public using Github issues.