Improving JuliaHealth Documentation Accessibility for Community Onboarding #59
Description
Project
The Julia Language (JuliaHealth)
Summary
The JuliaHealth ecosystem is rapidly expanding, with more than 50 community packages, over 300 members across Slack, Zulip, and Discourse, and tools like KomaMRI.jl that have doubled their GitHub stars in under a year. This project seeks funding to onboard new members and provide updated tutorials and workflows for JuliaHealth and the broader Julia ecosystem.
submitter
Carlos Castillo Passi
project lead
Community benefit
With this grant being funded, it will impact the JuliaHealth community as well as the broader Julia ecosystem by:
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(Goal 1) Attracting New Community Members and Contributors: By centralizing and making our documentation more broadly accessible, we can provide easy on-ramps for new JuliaHealth community members on how to get started with using JuliaHealth tools and how they can contribute.
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(Goal 2) Highlighting JuliaHealth Workflows: Through the development of explanatory guides for various health informatics workflows, we will illustrate how to use JuliaHealth and broader Julia tools to meet practical needs within such workflows.
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(Goal 3) Strengthening Community Robustness: As a result of updating our community documentation strategies, we will revamp our documentation deployment pipelines to ensure JuliaHealth workflows and dependent packages are monitored to not break supported workflows.
How will the impact be measured: To validate these benefits, we have deployed the GDPR-compliant, open-source analytics platform GoatCounter across JuliaHealth, enabling us to track traffic and engagement with our documentation. With this grant, we can measure whether our strategies improve outreach. We will also use the Julia Programming Language’s YouTube channel (90K+ subscribers) to assess engagement with recorded JuliaHealth materials. Finally, we will consolidate these data into a public dashboard that integrates documentation analytics, YouTube metrics, and JuliaHealth GitHub activity (via GitHubAnalytics.jl), where we expect to see measurable growth driven by this grant.
Amount requested (USD)
10000
Execution plan
Who will implement this:
Kosuri Indu (@kosuri-indu), a JuliaHealth Google Summer of Code fellow (‘25) and rising JuliaHealth contributor, will be the primary implementer for this grant.
Carlos Castillo Passi (@cncastillo), who will oversee coordination and strategic decisions for these grant efforts. Furthermore, the 300+ JuliaHealth member community will provide feedback via the Julia Slack channel #health-and-medicine and the Julia Discourse forum.
Note: In the event Indu is unable to complete tasks due to unforeseen circumstances or needs further support, additional JuliaHealth contributors Hetarth Shah (@Hetarth02) and Divyansh Goyal (@divital-coder) are available to assist.
What's the timeline:
The project is planned for a 3-month intensive period, designed to deliver substantial impact within one SDG round. Should initial progress be strong and further needs identified, a follow-up proposal for a subsequent round could be considered.
- Months 1-2: Building the JuliaHealth Ecosystem: Docs, CI, and Cross-Language Workflows
- Deliverable: Improved main JuliaHealth website (more details in the next section)
- Deliverable: Move one JuliaHealth package to DocumenterVitepress so it can serve as a template
- Month 3: Dissemination, Finalization & Reporting
- Deliverable: At least one JuliaHealth blog post published, sharing, and best practices learned.
- Deliverable: Report on user engagement metrics from analytics system.
- Deliverable: Final project summary and report submitted to NumFOCUS.
How will it be done:
To support our community benefit goals of 1) Attracting New Community Members and Contributors, 2) Highlighting JuliaHealth Workflows, and 3) Strengthening Community Robustness, we detail the following groupings of specific tasks to be done:
Attracting New Community Members and Contributors (Goal 1)
- Improved package listing and discovery of JuliaHealth packages across sub-ecosystems.
- [Feature] (Website) Compare JuliaHealth Capabilities To Other Ecosystems (GitHub Reference Issue)
- [Feature] (Website) Showing JuliaHealth’s activity across platforms (GitHub Reference Issue)
- General discovery information about what JuliaHealth is and its partners.
- [Feature] (Website) Add a section for "Users, Researchers and Developers of JuliaHealth" (Reference Community Discussion; GitHub Reference Issue)
- [DOCS] (Website) Update and Enumerate Partner/Friend Organizations (GitHub Reference Issue)
- [Feature] (Website) All Contributors Integration (GitHub Reference Issue)
- [Feature] (Website) Explain how to migrate package to JuliaHealth (GitHub Reference Issue)
Package maintenance, and standardization of CI workflows and documentation: (Goal 2, Goal 3)
- Conduct a detailed audit of current documentation and CI status for key packages.
- Summarize as JuliaHealth blog post
- Develop standardized templates for documentation structure and CI workflows (GitHub Actions) for JuliaHealth packages.
- Move package to DocumenterVitepress to serve as a template
- Submit issues to corresponding packages, and suggest documentation or CI maintenance fixes across JuliaHealth.
Building a JuliaHealthZoo: (Goal 1, Goal 2)
- Set-up JuliaHealthZoo repository taking inspiration from:
- Describe ecosystem workflows:
- Patient level prediction with observational health tooling (GitHub Reference Issue)
- Geospatial health informatics using census microdata (Survey.jl / survey R package) (GitHub Reference Issue)
- Medical imaging simulation, then reconstruct MRIReco.jl, BART (C++/Python) with BartIO.jl (Julia wrapper) (GitHub Reference Issue)
- Configure JuliaHealthZoo CI/CD to provide ecosystem integration test suite