Repositories

Our approach: what goes where

While there are several repos associated with Open Forest, the Open Forest team is most active in three primary repos: fs-open-forest, fs-open-forest-platform, and fs-open-forest-ops. These repos serve different people and purposes.

fs-open-forest

Who it serves: Forest Service stakeholders, new Open Forest team members (including contractors), and the public.

Why we have it: So that the Open Forest Product Manager and Product Owner can easily find and share program material with Forest Service stakeholders, keeping them informed; so that new team members can quickly get up to speed on project history and past decisions; so that we are transparent about our progress and processes.

What it contains: General program information including the overall vision, opportunity statement, and high-level strategy, and information on program principles and team working practices. The repo also contains up-to-date timelines, and ongoing program updates including executive briefing presentations and discovery research reports. We also track the progress of program level tasks in a ZenHub board associated with this repo.

How it’s maintained: The Forest Service Product Manager ensures that project updates and new material (e.g., research reports) are added to the repo in a timely manner, and that the team audits and revises the content quarterly. It’s common for the PM to delegate the task of updating content to other team members.

Criteria for adding content here:

• Content is core to the program and the broader product vision and strategy
• Content is understandable to a general audience

Making changes and submitting a pull request (PR): Team members can propose changes to the repo by creating a new branch and submitting a pull request. PRs need to be reviewed and approved by at least one Forest Service staff member, either the Product Owner or the Product Manager. After approved, the reviewer can merge the PR into the Master branch.

fs-open-forest-platform

Who it serves: The Open Forest delivery team responsible for the ongoing maintenance of the Open Forest platform and applications, including ongoing research, design, development, and security operations.

Why we have it: So that members of the Open Forest delivery team can track their work and make their work visible to team mates, Forest Service stakeholders, and the public. So that anyone interested in the project can understand how the platform and applications are being developed and be able to leverage the code.

What it contains: This is the primary code-bearing repo for the Open Forest Platform. This repo also contains documentation for running tests and general onboarding information for product team members.

How it’s maintained: Members of the product delivery team (designers, software developers, Product Owner, and Product Manager) update and create new content in the code repo and in the issue tracker (ZenHub) on a daily basis. In addition, the team makes ad hoc updates to the README and other documentation in response to changes in code, tooling, or third party services.

Criteria for adding content here:

• Content is core to the day to day functioning and operation of the product delivery team
• Content is written in plain language but may be specific enough to the project that it might raise questions for those outside of the Open Forest team

Making changes and submitting a pull request (PR) Proposed work is reviewed and prioritized by the product owner. PRs need to be reviewed and approved by at least one other engineer. After approved, the reviewer can merge the PR into the sprint-x-development branch, where x is the number or name of the current sprint.

Issues completed by PR can be moved into 'done' column on the Zen Hub board.

What content goes in a README vs. a wiki

Typically READMEs tell people what the project is about, what the project does, and why the project is useful. We chose to put this information in our wiki so that stakeholders and friends of the show who are unfamiliar with GitHub can find this information plus additional updates that are important to them in one, easily navigable place.

Additional Open Forest repos

Code-bearing repos

• Open Forest Special Use Middlelayer API
• US Forest Service Fork of the Web Design Standards
• FS Cloud Migration DevOps repository