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CIG > Community > Developer > Donating Code > Code Donation Process
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Code Donation Process

Information about the CIG code donation process.

Why would I donate my work to CIG?

Oftentimes students or researchers will write a computer program to solve a specific problem (the so-called "hero code"), however, once finished the code is stored away and not touched again. This is unfortunate both for the researcher who put lots of their time into the code, as well as for other scientists who want to solve similar problems but don't know about the code that already exists. Effort may be duplicated, methodology and results may be unclear, and the original researcher may not get as much credit as they deserve.

This is where CIG can help. One of the goals of CIG is to "develop, support, and disseminate community-accessible software for the geodynamics research community". We want help make well documented and scientifically sound codes available to the broader community. This way the scientific community benefits from more resources, and researchers benefit from having their work better publicized.

I'm interested. What does CIG need from me?

Contact CIG (Eric Heien at ) and let us know you'd like to donate your code. We will respond soon and tell you how to send the code/documentation/examples to us.

For the best chance of having your code accepted, please follow these guidelines:
  • Donated codes should have been used in scientific work in the geophysics area - either published papers or presentations.
    Please include references to these so users can learn more about the work and easily cite it.
  • Indicate which platform(s) your code compiles on and which compilers it requires.
  • Indicate whether it requires any external libraries (MPI, HDF, etc) and, if so, what versions.
    This will help CIG and users easily run your code.
  • Provide good documentation of the code, including:
    - A manual detailing the history of the code, science behind it, and explanation of inputs/outputs. This needn't be more than a few pages.
    - Well structured source code with useful comments and descriptive function and variable names.
  • Provide good example input file(s) for the code and the corresponding output file(s).
    This will help users understand the input/output and help CIG test your code.
  • If available, provide a history of changes to the code or a source repository for it.
Once these have been provided and your code approved, CIG will place it on the geodynamics.org website along with appropriate graphics, references, documentation. For details about the different types of support offered by CIG please see the appropriate page. We will discuss with researchers what level of support is appropriate for their donated code.
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