The GitHub web platform offers various tools to help communicate with users and developers of an open source code base. It is the responsibility of an administrator to adjust the configuration of these tools as the requirements of the project evolve over time, and to monitor and respond to the messages initiated by other users through the GitHub platform. This page briefly describes the components of the current SKIRT project's GitHub presence, and the specific actions expected from an administrator.

For more information, see:

the GitHub online documentation: https://docs.github.com/en
overview of the SKIRT project's GitHub presence: Contributing

Organization

The SKIRT project's GitHib presence is bundled in a GitHub organization called "SKIRT" and with URL https://github.com/SKIRT. As an administrator, you can switch your dashboard between a personal context (your username) and an organization context (SKIRT). The former focuses on your personal forks, which may include forks from repositories unrelated to SKIRT, and the latter on the original SKIRT respositories.

The organization page is where much of the GitHub presence can be configured. Action is necessary only when the requirements of the SKIRT project evolve.

Teams

Because the repositories are public, any GitHub user has read access and can post an issue or send a pull request. In addition, the SKIRT organization defines two teams that offer extra capabilities to their members:

The Contributor Team members have access to the SKIRT Contributor Team page so that they can participate in project-wide discussions and receive SKIRT-related broadcast notifications. In practice, however, these features have not been used in recent years. It would be worth revisiting the goals of this team and considering more active management of its contents or replacing it by another mechanism.
The Core Team members have full administrative rights for the SKIRT organization, including write access to the repositories. A new administrator should be added to this team.

Repositories

The SKIRT organization currently includes the following repositories:

SKIRT9, PTS9, Web9: the currently active respositories; management of these repositories is discussed elsewhere in this administrator guide (e.g., Updating SKIRT, Updating PTS, Updating the web site).
SKIRT7, SKIRT8, WEB8, PTS: obsolete repositories for users who didn't yet make the transition to version 9; perhaps these repositories can be removed in the near future (caveat: the PTS repository contains a suite of python code developed by Sam Verstocken that is not directly related to SKIRT but may still be in use by some authors – ask Marjorie Decleir).
CosTuuM: a code for calculating emission properties of spheroidal dust grains developed by Bert Vandenbroucke; it is hosted here because it can generate material properties for use with SKIRT.

Issues

The SKIRT9 and PTS9 repositories are configured with an issues page and with templates for reporting questions and bugs through the issues page. An important benefit of communicating through this mechanism (as opposed to private messages via email) is that the questions and responses are and remain publicly available and thus automatically augment the body of documentation for the SKIRT project.

All members of the Core Team should be configured to receive an automatic email from the GitHub platform whenever an issue is added or updated. It is the administrator's responsibility to ensure a timely response to each question, handle the issue appropriately, and finally close it.

The issue feature is already used fairly actively, although some users still contact us through private email. Those users should be encouraged to report their questions as a GitHub issue.

Pull requests

The SKIRT9 and PTS9 repositories are configured with a pull requests page and with a template for creating a pull request. As mentioned in the description of the SKIRT project directory structure and in the instructions for Updating SKIRT and Updating PTS, any and all changes to these repositories must be affected through a pull request. A key benefit of this requirement is that all updates are and remain publicly documented.

All members of the Core Team should be configured to receive an automatic email from the GitHub platform whenever an pull request is added. It is the administrator's responsibility to ensure a timely response and to handle the pull request appropriately, leading to either merging the pull request into the main repository or rejecting the request. For more information, see Updating SKIRT and Updating PTS.