READMEs and Ethics

Effective README docs can be difficult to write. There are a lot of projects that assume the reader has a decent amount of familiarity with the project and knows how to set everything up. I know that this deterred me from contributing to or even using a project. I’m using NetPyne as my example.The README directs the user to go to its own documentation which doesn’t actually take you directly to a tutorial for setting up. Clicking on the link that jumps you to the installation section of the site tells you to go to ANOTHER site to install a package to make NetPyne work properly. So this has me thinking: what are the crucial elements that need to be addressed in the README?

In CS curriculum, I see a lot of pure programming classes. I graduated from Tandon School of Engineering. Questioning the ethics of something, whatever we end up wanting to build, was either an afterthought or never brought up. I think it’s a shame that higher education curriculum for CS is shaped around the programming method of the week and making some irrelevant program for homework. It’s when you are required to go beyond making and absolute value program for your professor where you learn how to design for people. Ethics is a uniquely human construct of principles pertaining to what behavior is good or bad. It’s something that doesn’t really fit nicely under curriculum objectives because of how sensitive and subjective the topics can be. I think every community has it’s own ethical perspective and deciding which community we want to contribute to relates to how our own sense of beliefs align with the other’s in that particular community.