Docs: add more post-release steps

RELEASE.md

@@ -1,17 +1,46 @@
-Release Process:
+# Release instructions
+
+## Release Process:
 
 * bump version in `pyproject.toml`
 * update `CHANGELOG.md`
 * once code is merged into `main`
-  * Create a new Release in Github
-    * Target `main`
-    * Create a new tag that matches new version from `pyproject.toml`
-  * By creating a tag, this triggers the [release workflow](./.github/workflows/release.yml) which builds and
-    pushes the new version to PyPi
+    * Create a new Release in Github
+        * Target `main`
+        * Create a new tag that matches new version from `pyproject.toml`
+    * By creating a tag, this triggers the [release workflow](./.github/workflows/release.yml) which builds and
+      pushes the new version to PyPi
+
+## Post-release steps
+
+### **Mandatory** Post-Release updates:
+
+Because openstates-core is used by several other openstates repositories as a dependency,
+there is functionality that couples changes in this repo to the other repo. After releasing
+an update to this repo, you MUST bump up the version of the `openstates` dependency and
+perform release steps for the following:
+
+* openstates-scrapers: simply merge a PR against the `main` branch
+*
+openstates-realtime: [follow deploy steps](https://github.com/openstates/openstates-realtime?tab=readme-ov-file#deployment)
+
+### **Suggested** Post-Release updates:
 
-Post-Release updates:
+If you make a change to the data models (outside of scrape-specific models), then you
+probably need to bump one or more of the following so that they continue to query
+the data correctly:
 
 * api-v3
 * openstates.org
-* scrapers
+
+Less frequently, the following need to be updated
+
 * people
+* openstates-geo
+
+### Useful commands
+
+To assess the `openstates-core` version of multiple Open States repositories, if they are
+all checked out in the same directory on your machine:
+
+`grep -Hrn --include="pyproject.toml" "openstates =" .`