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GSA
Suggested Content: A guide focused at helping an agency onboard GitHub
We need content to support a variety of paths for agencies, but for some, GitHub will be a good fit. Given it's popularity in government (and the wider world), it'll be useful to have a short page of guidance focused on it.
https://pages.18f.gov/open-source-program/setting-up-github/ is a first pass at this.
Should probably focus on more than Github. Github is not SaaS approved at GSA and probably a lot of other agencies (we are working on this and the USCIO is working a policy for all gov't too...come on new policy for SaaS ;-)). Totally on board with 100% open source, just have to be careful about what is being put out. We are working on some scripts (webhooks) for teams to run on their repos to check for "things" that should not go public (account info, IPs, etc.).
There are other tools out there besides Github (ironically typing that while in Github). And being good public service stewards, we should consider all tools that can help. Have a more generic guide about publishing to a known open source/code sharing environment (and sort of leave it at that).
It would be worth also pointing out other options as well such as https://bitbucket.org and https://gitlab.com
A couple more references that I would love to see combined if possible (as I'm in the process of getting something similar together for @LLNL):
- https://handbook.18f.gov/github/
- https://github.com/fisma-ready/github
My dream would be to have these combined into something like a https://handbook.cio.gov/github or similar, which would be applicable and directly useable by agencies and contractors.
Said another way, let's try to avoid different agencies forming different guidance and instead adopt a common set of best practices across the entire federal government for use of GitHub. I am one of the maintainers of @LLNL but I don't want to maintain my own separate best practices and documentation, I'd rather develop it in collaboration with all the rest of the federal agencies and organizations and point to it as a common requirement.
Just to have another write up... I've created an on boarding guide this week for the @LLNL org:
https://github.com/LLNL/llnl.github.io/blob/master/about/using-github.md
As a starting point, I have put together a rough general guide around getting started in a public code repo that can be grabbed and reused under Creative Commons (was put together for New Zealand govt context but would be relevant generally with some adaption) - this is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xRwGcxplQW5vtC6eM3Zdu3fRUBbfqeSsBP3836Xicmw/edit#heading=h.kpkd6v9j30qv go nuts... :)
Not GitHub specific, but as we talk about guides, GitHub recently released a set of guides to help teams and groups better manage and understand all things Open Source:
https://opensource.guide (and backing content at: https://github.com/github/open-source-guide/) As more agencies work on setting up an Open Source presence for their 20%, I hope this comes in handy.
Let me know if anyone wants more information
Great idea, but putting on hold due to inactivity and current priorities. Hopefully, we'll have bandwidth later to take up the conversation again! :-)
Changing status to backlog, which means we'd be happy to look at Pull Requests, but we are not currently working on this because of competing higher priorities.