BC Open Source Development Employee Guide
May, 2015
This document is "Beta" – however, all steps indicated as "required" are to be considered mandatory. Feedback and suggestions for improvement are welcome using the GitHub issues functionality.
BC Guidelines for Employee Participation in GitHub
- Principles for Participation
- Browsing and Consuming Material in GitHub
- Approval Requirements
- Approaches to Collaborating/Contributing
- Appropriate Use
- Conflict of Interest, Privacy and Intellectual Property
- Licenses
- Security
This Guide is designed to support our venture into the realm of consuming and contributing code and content to GitHub as a government organization. At least initially, the processes for accessing and using GitHub are being managed closely in order to ensure we have a good understanding of the steps and factors necessary for success. This Guide will evolve as we learn and gain more experience – and your questions, comments and suggestions are welcome to help it along. Feel free to comment via GitHub issues.
GitHub is an online platform for developers to exchange and collaborate on code. It is the largest public code-sharing site with over 19 million code repositories and over 8 million people collaborating, sharing code and building amazing things.
There is increasing interest across the public sector in developing or deploying open source software as well as making code that was developed "in-house" available to developers. The Province is using GitHub to harness this collaboration to build software, support innovation, and save time and money. These guidelines aim to encourage employees to use GitHub to contribute their skills and collaborate, and to help identify important requirements and manage risks associated with participating in these activities.
Portions of this and following sections rely significantly on Code for America: Civic Commons - Releasing Open Source