Welcome to the OpenCon HQ
OpenCon is a conference and community dedicated to advancing open research and education. In an effort to walk the talk, while increasing our effectiveness, transparency and openness we're changing our organizing processes to be "open-by-default".
What you can find here
On this repository you'll find the discussions we're having, what we're planning, what we're making and more.
Using Github
Github was designed for coders to store their projects, but we're using it differently. Here, we'll use Github to replace internal email lists, gantt charts, and to-do lists with a more open system.
How to use this repository
If you're not familiar with using Github, please don't hesitate to reach out. For OC members, all that is required is making an account and responding to messages, which is possible over email as usual. This section provides more information on the different parts of the system and how we'll use them.
Getting notified
If you're on the Organizing Committee, you can ignore this section, unless you want to be jnotified about everything. For most people, the right setting is "watch", which is the default.
You can adjust your email notification settings as shown by the Gif. Usually, you'll only need to update these if you never want to get an email, or you want to get every email from the repo (even if it doesn't directly concern you).
If Gifs aren't your thing...
Up in the top right, there's a button that says 'Watch'; click it, and set yourself to 'Watching'. This will send you email notifications of new discussions; if you don't want email, but would like an alert just on GitHub, change the setting in Settings -> Notification Center.
Issues
Issues are where we host discussions about OpenCon. They're easy to find above.
You can respond to an issue from your email client. When you get a notification, just hit reply - no need to use the site.
When to start an issue
We're trying to be open by default, and use this to centre all to-do's & discussion. So, the answer is always, except:
- when it concerns fundraising, personnel (or personal) information, something we've not announced yet (e.g a big grant activity), or other highly sensitive issues.
- when it's a todo that you can complete without anyone else's input (to track it, a "- [ ] " on an existing issue might make more sense).
If you're unsure, ask.
- You can start an issue via email by sending your message to cloo+sparcopen/opencon@cottagelabs.com. The subject is your issue title, the email body is the issue comment.
When to close an issue
When something is "done". This will depend on the issue at hand. A good practice is to, early on, define what "done" means.
Anyone can, and should, close an issue when it is done.
Closing an issue is a reversible process. If you think something needs more discussion or something was missed - reopen.
Including others
By default, only a small fraction of the people included in a repository will be included. To reach out to more you can:
- "@" them directly by username
- "@" them by team name:
- @sparcopen/oc-opencon
- @sparcopen/staff-opencon
NOTE: Many OC members will not see messages by default.
Assigning
Assigning is used to help people understand who can take action on an issue and who's responsible.
Labels
Labels add metadata and enable easy sorting of issues.
Milestones
Milestones make issues / to-do's timebound. We occationally use these for specific deadlines, but usually they're used to track our progress generally and note what we want to do each year. E.g our one for 2018 is https://github.com/sparcopen/opencon/milestone/13.
Projects
We use projects to make OpenCon's Gantt Chart: https://github.com/sparcopen/opencon/projects/5. This helps us track and manage our workloads.
Files / Code
For now, we're generally not using GitHub to store files. Instead, we're going to stick to our normal Google Docs ways, and simply link out to our drive & important files.
Other OpenCon repositories
We have a couple of other repositories for specific OpenCon projects, code, and datasets. You can find them here.
Any Questions?
Ask @JosephMcArthur / joe@righttoresearch.org