Definition of Process for Code List Maintenance on Github

[cmsdroff]

Use of GitHub will be new to many within the UNLOCODE maintenance group, however the use of GitHub is well documented and it has very definitive processes that we will be making use of, namely;

• Code Repository - where we will hold the data for unlocodes, to see how this is managed by others for code lists look at the DCSA with Unit of Measure for example
• Pull Requests - this is how we will manage the requests in GitHub, we can sort in various ways to manage effectively
• Release/Tag - This is how we will publish the official releases
• Milestones - We will use milestones to group the pull requests under a future release (i.e. D23a) we will apply this automatically when creating the pull request or it can be added by the maintenance team.

Process Diagrams

From the diagrams on the cefact page I have reduced these down to show how they could be handled under GitHub, there is still room for cleaning these up but they will serve as a good starting point, the diagrams can be edited in draw.io a free tool.

DMR New Request

Once the pull requests are made they can also be edited and discussed in Github by the requestor or maintenance team.

Approval or Rejection of Request

This is controlled and we would setup a group of core reviewers from the maintenance team, as well as from the secretariat and any country focal points as needed. They would need to register for a GitHub account (free) and we would add them to the review panel. Reviewers can be assigned automatically.

[cmsdroff]

Once the requests are validated the Secretariat uses a column (AC) to verify and copy the codes into the MDB file to get ready to publish them.

This would be replaced by Tag for official release and main branch for latest codes.