Instructions and help for using the eLife Ambassadors GitHub organisation

GitHub offers a way to collaborate on projects with a distributed team of people working online, or just work on projects by yourself!

It's a useful platform to use to host your files and manage your collaborative work online.

GitHub was first designed for open source software development. GitHub is platform that is designed to work using git – git is a coding method for version control. You don't need to know or use git to use GitHub.

And you don't need to code to use GitHub. Many people use Github for working on non-code content, and that’s ok! It's a really powerful tool for project work.

GitHub offers a nice user interface for working with git, and it adds some really handy features, from conversations in Issues, and a way to offer and receive suggested changes, and use peer review before suggestions are accepted.

With GitHub, you can easily make a free basic website for your project, and include fun things like emojis and GIFs in your homepage.

Here are some examples of GitHub being used for projects about collaboration, openness, diversity and inclusion in the life sciences:

• A Women in Science initiative: https://github.com/malvikasharan/EMBL-Women-2019
• A web-based handbook for reproducible data science: https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/the-turing-way
• An R package for data analysis: https://github.com/weecology/portalr

The eLife Ambassadors have a non-profit account on GitHub, which means we can host a repository for you within this eLifeAmbassadors organisation (homepage: https://github.com/eLifeAmbassadors) and you can maintain public and private repositories for free.

The eLife Ambassadors GitHub organisation is a place where we can collect all content that eLife Ambassadors wish to share with Ambassadors and others outside the programme using GitHub. This helps everyone to find things and keep things tidy: Keeping your project in this organisation will help your work be discoverable to others – we'll need only to point people to this GitHub and they'll see all your projects in one place. Members of the organisation (i.e. other ambassadors and any collaborators) can view private repositories. Anyone on the internet can view public repositories.

In this guide, you’ll find the basic guidelines for how we use and manage the eLife Ambassadors GitHub organisation.

Two training workshops will run in May 2020.

Training workshop agenda and notes: link to be added Supporting documentation to support activities: https://github.com/eLifeAmbassadors/developing_collaborative_document

The admins of this organisation are:

• Naomi @npscience, eLife Community Manager
• Lotte @lottedewinde, eLife Early-Career Advisory Group
• Shyam @smsaladi, eLife Early-Career Advisory Group
• Devang @devang-mehta, eLife Early-Career Advisory Group
• Aziz @asntech, eLife Ambassador
• Vivek @vivekbhr, eLife Ambassador

A governance structure, and clear roles, are TBD

eLife maintain this account's billing and should be primary contact for account issues and reports of violations of the eLife Ambassadors Code of Conduct (available from the community's Discourse forum).

Before you can contribute into this organisation, you need to apply to become a member. All eLife Ambassadors, Associates, and verified external contributors to Ambassador projects, can become a member.

1. (If not already done) Sign up for a GitHub account: to use GitHub beyond browsing and clicking, you’ll need an account (which is free as in $¥€£ 0, see pricing) – you can sign up at https://github.com/join.
2. Apply to join this organisation by posting a reply to this Issue thread – you need to be signed into the GitHub account that you wish the invite to be sent to.

1. Transfer an existing repository into this organisation account: instructions WIP
2. Create a new repository in this organisation: instructions WIP

Recommended practices for:

• repository organisation: instructions WIP
• collaborating here: instructions WIP

• Contribute to this guide: instructions WIP
• TODO: Add a governance structure