Parcels as a project is exposed to new people through different avenues:

• To oceanographers through academia, both to researchers interested in the project for their work as well as oceanography students learning about Lagrangian ocean particle tracking
• To software developers looking to make contributions to impactful climate software projects. These software developers may find Parcels organically, or through projects like Open Sustain Technology which aggregate such software projects (including Parcels).

Lowering the bar for new contributors to parcels from both these demographics would enrich the open source experience in the codebase, as well as bring in people with varied skillsets.

TODO:

• Update the contributing page of the documentation to include a section at the top "Why contribute?" which highlights the importance of Lagrangian ocean particle tracking to climate science, and the role of the Parcels project in this domain.
• Update readme to add a "call to contributors" linking to the contributing page. Add contributing.md file as well linking to docs.
• Add all-contributors to recognise contributors to Parcels (as well as their type of contribution) in the project readme. Also include the bot to streamline adding contributors via
• Create issues in codebase to make avenues for parcels development public
• Clean up projects in repo
• Add tags to issues to make them more searchable ("good first issue", "oceanography" (highlighting features specifically requiring oceanographic knowledge/discussion), priority tags ("low priority", "medium priority", "high priority")). The priority tags in particular would allow developers to focus towards the most impactful features.
• Update issue template to promote:
  • reporting the version number
  • providing a minimal breaking code sample when reporting bugs
• (low priority) Add a dev container to the repo allowing for development in Docker or in GitHub codespaces (GitHub's cloud development option). Developing with the conda environment is easy, so this is a low priority and might not be implemented, but it may be nice for those on Windows wanting to access Linux-only CLI features or those working in codespaces.