mesoSPIM is a community of people who build, break, fix and share microscopes. It works because people are generous with what they know. This document is a short note on how we'd like to keep it that way.
Be kind. Assume good faith. Share what you learn.
Our community spans people who design optics for a living and people switching on a light-sheet microscope for the first time. Both belong here.
- Beginner questions are welcome. Everyone was new once, usually more recently than they admit. Answering patiently is as much a contribution as writing code.
- Share the things that didn't work, not just the things that did. A config that broke your setup, an alignment that never converged, a dead end — these save other people weeks.
- Criticize code and ideas, not people. Say "this will lock the GUI" rather than "you don't understand threading."
- Credit people. If someone's idea, config or debugging got you somewhere, say so.
- Remember there's hardware at the other end. Advice that sounds clever can cost someone a real objective or a real sample. If you're not sure, say you're not sure.
Not welcome, and hopefully obvious: harassment of any kind, personal attacks, sexualized language or imagery, sharing someone's private information, or being persistently unpleasant in a way that makes people stop asking questions.
We're a small project without a moderation team, so this is informal.
Most friction is a misunderstanding — often between people writing in a second or third language, across very different backgrounds. If you can sort it out directly and in good faith, that's usually best.
If you can't, or if it's something you shouldn't have to handle yourself, contact the maintainers at info@mesospim.org. We'll listen, keep it private, and do something about it. Depending on what happened, that might be a quiet word, asking someone to step back from a thread, or removing them from the project's spaces. We'd much rather never need the last one.
The GitHub repositories, the image.sc forum, the mailing list, and mesoSPIM meetings and hackathons — online or in person.
That's it. Now go build something.