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

Meetings on video call with agenda
- Meet quarterly (potentially monthly, if needed)
- Discuss changes that have already occured, 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 (Ken, Stu)
EMBL Communications (notably Digital and Design)
EMBL-EBI Web Development and UX
Nominated service representatives (and those interested)
Relationship with EMBL-EBI Web Guidelines Committee
The requestor(s) of a new component or change

What if...

My idea gets rejected? The agreed implemention doesn't cover my needs?

Even if your need can't be acconomidated in the global VF repositiory, You can still create and use a custom component in your local project. You can also share that component on npm for others to use.

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.