Consultation process

The Visual Framework 2.0 is an open source project meant for the wider life science community, so we aim to be transparent about which components are canonized, what isn't and why decisions are made.

With this wide remit, the VF needs to be disciplined and flexible — empathy, consideration and consultation are key to our governance approach.

This process will help the overall quality of the VF and ensure users don’t need to fork code, can deliver quality sites and are able to deliver the correct corporate identity.

Key considerations

What is the use case being addressed?
What are some ways to facilitate the behaviour?
What is the most flexible approach?
- Will it prevent the ability to deliver a corporate brand?
- Does it break existing functionality?
- Is it of general use beyond a particular “specialist area”?
What is the most technically compatible way?
What should it look like?
- Is it good best practice (technically, visually, UX)?
Who will implement, how “expensive” is it?
- We encourage code contributions

We aim to produce consistency and clear guidance on best practice. We also want to revise existing components to share lessons learned.

The decision process

Quarterly virtual meetings
- Agenda-driven discussions
- Discuss changes that have already occurred, and new requests
- Establish goals, priorities for next period of time
Decisions stored in the VF documentation
- What was agreed
- Why it was agreed
Document and circulate
- Conversation on GitHub issues
- Discussions and ideas on Slack

At a high level it follows this flow diagram.

Who

VF core maintainers
EMBL Communications' Digital and Design teams
EMBL-EBI Web Development, UX and Communications teams
Nominated service representatives
Relationship with EMBL-EBI Web Guidelines Committee
The requestor(s) of a new component or change

When

In addition to the quarterly consultation, we meet on regular basis in three channels:

Design consultation, every other Monday
UX consultation, every other Tuesday
Technical consultation, monthly on the first Thursday

These form initial discussion and debate on new ideas before they are further tested and actioned on the GitHub issue queue.

How to propose

If you have an idea you'd like to suggest, the best places to begin are:

raise the topic on Slack
create a conversation on GitHub
If you have a more formal request, you can email it to ken.hawkins [at] embl.de.

In any case we'll help you convert it to an actionable proposal for the correct group of consultation.

What if my idea gets rejected?

The agreed implementation doesn't cover my needs?

Even if your need can't be accommodated:

the Visual Framework accommodate customisation at the edge (in Sass or JavaScript) or core changes (by bringing your own build process or design tokens)
you can create and use a custom component in your local project and share the component on npm for others to use

The Visual Framework allows "local rule". You won't be blocked from adding and overriding components.

We achieve

We work to avoid entropy and fragmentation of the VF through a consultative process that has been proven to work with the VF 1.x.

We strive for an inclusive process that guides the 300+ developers to make the right decisions. We avoid being website police — we know past experience that we neither have the resources to monitor all sites nor can we force services to do a re-development.

we move forward with the VF as one system with many implementations
the VF is as good as it can be
we have a record of how and why things change
we want bring more sites into the fold

We remain mindful to support communicating, collaborating, engaging.