Why?
ready4 is open source because we believe that transparent and collaborative approaches to model development are more likely to produce transparent, reusable and updatable models. No one modelling team has the resources or breadth of expertise and diversity of values to adequately address all of the important decision topics in youth mental health systems design and policy. Opportunities for modellers to test, re-use, update and combine each other’s work help make modelling projects more valid and tractable. Models have become increasingly complex, so simply publishing model code and data may have limited impact on improving model transparency. These aretefacts also need to be understood and tested. Clear documentation and frequent re-use in different contexts by multiple types of stakeholder make it more likely that errors and limitations can be exposed and remedied. Decentralising ownership of a model to an active community can help sustain the maintenance and extension of a model over the long term and mitigate risks and bottlenecks associated with dependency on a small number of team members.
What?
Our aim is to enhance the resilience, quality, legitimacy and impact of ready4 by developing a community of users and contributors. The most important initial types of help we need with achieving this goal are funding, community support and advice.
How?
The process of developing the ready4 community involves the following tasks:
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Creating and recruiting to volunteer advisory structures to elicit guidance on strategic, technical and conceptual topics.
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Enhancing the ease of use for third parties of existing framework authoring tools.
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Developing improved documentation and collateral (e.g. video tutorials) for ready4 software and data.
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Configuring hosting repositories to implement clear collaborative development workflows.
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Promoting ready4 to potential users and stakeholders.
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Continually expanding, diversifying and updating the authorship and maintenance responsibilities of all ready4 software.
When?
We plan to begin seeking input into nascent advisory structures during 2023. The speed at which we undertake other activities to grow the ready4 community depends on our success at securing funding to provide required support infrastructure.