Project

Contributing

Open Life Lab is an exploratory project. Useful contributions include corrections to claims, careful source evaluations, clearer explanations, reproducible experiments, and improvements to the website or simulation. Results that challenge a working hypothesis are welcome.

Choose a repository

Work lives in separate GitLab projects:

• Research and design: shared investigations, interpretations, and design proposals.
• Reference library: paper notes, reading records, and connections between sources and research questions.
• Documents: reviewed explanations for readers of the website.
• Website: the site and its content presentation.
• Primordial simulation: simulation code and its usage information.

Read the relevant repository's README and contribution instructions before making a change. For a larger proposal, start by describing the problem, the proposed scope, and the evidence or comparison that would help assess it. Keep changes focused so they are easy to review.

Contribute research or an experiment

When discussing a source, link it and distinguish what it reports from your interpretation. Record what you actually read, including the version and relevant sections. Explain why a source matters and where its findings may not apply.

Keep general research independent of a particular implementation. Design proposals can cite that research, with assumptions and unresolved questions stated explicitly.

For an experiment, record the code revision, runtime, parameters, initial conditions, random seed where relevant, duration, and measurements. Explain what happened, how it compares with a useful baseline, and what the result does or does not support. Keep observations separate from interpretations.

Improve documentation or code

Explain the problem your change addresses and how you checked the result. Follow the repository's existing conventions and include any remaining limitations. Keep credentials, local settings, build outputs, and incidental logs out of a contribution.

Website documents are reviewed individually before publication. A document change needs review of its new version before it appears on the site. Simulation usage instructions belong with the relevant simulation repository so they can stay aligned with its code.

The current project status describes what is implemented and which questions remain open.