Computer Vision News - October 2020

2 Open Source Deep Learning Platform 40 by developers, but they are generally synchronized with the platform’s release cycle. The greatest challenge with working groups is that they must ensure that all parties are engaged and communicating effectively. They are conduits for the exchange of roadmap ideas; they are not software architects. Throughout our conversations with these developers, one message became clear, a platform’s community is its greatest strength . Community support and contributions allow a platform to have the greatest impact; however, several of the developers acknowledged that the community often does not fully appreciate the difficulties associated with maintaining and contributing code to a project. Whether a contribution is coming from a lead developer or a new developer, it must be rigorously evaluated. All code must support multiple operating systems and machine configurations, select code style standards, coding best practices, and multiple use cases. Typically numerous public and private discussions, code revisions, and documentation updates must occur as a contribution is processed, and the person who is submitting a contribution must ultimately take responsibility for ensuring that their contribution progresses through that process and concludes successfully. So, how can you become an open source developer, help your research have maximum impact, and enjoy the challenges of high-quality software processes that support community development? The ITK and MONAI developers offered several suggestions, and the two most prominent were the following. First, consider that there are manyways to contribute: communicating your ideas to members of the working groups; submitting issues, feature requests, and bug reports; improving documentation; creating new tutorials; conducting code reviews for pending pull requests; and contributing bug fixes as well as new algorithms. Second, when making any contribution, be it a bug report or new algorithm, please take the time to learn the contribution procedures of the project: identify and use the proper forums, follow reporting and code templates when appropriate, andmonitor and support the progression of your contribution through those procedures. Clearly, becoming an open source software developer isn’t for everyone, but we welcome you to join the MONAI and ITK communities, and we look forward to your contributions in whatever form they take!