Got questions about using GitHub within government? Join us Thursday August 29th at 1:00 EST to talk all things GitHub for open source, open data, and open government.

github-for-government-office-hours.md

GitHub for Government Office Hours

Got questions about using GitHub within government? Join us Thursday August 29th at 1:00 EST to talk all things GitHub for open source, open data, and open government.

Free and open to the public, if you're a federal, state, local, or municipal employee, or just a civic hacker interested in governmenty things, we're here to answer your questions.

The Details

• Thursday August 29th, 1:00 PM EDT / 10 AM PDT
• One hour, drop in to ask a single question, or hang out the entire time
• Don't leave your desk! Join us online or via phone
• Free and open to the public
• Register today. It takes 30 seconds, really.

What sort of questions should I ask?

Anything you can imagine. But here are a few to get you started:

• How can you sign up for a free GitHub.com account?
  We'll walk you through the process right then and there.
• You've got a GitHub account, now what?
  What are some successful use cases and case studies you can look at?
• What's a pull request? If someone says something about forking, should I report them to HR?
• You've got some open source projects, what's the best way to grow a community around your code?
• How do GitHub Pages work?
  Can I use it for things other than code like the White House Open Data Policy?
• What the deal with open source licensing and government code?
• Is GitHub secure? Can I trust it with my non-open source code?
• How do permissions work? Does anyone have access to my code?
• Questions about command-line Git
• Questions about GitHub for Windows and GitHub for Mac
• The hardest Git questions you can come up with. Questions about rebasing, or multiple remotes
• Anything you can imagine

Who'll be holding office hours

• @jlord and @benbalter from GitHub's government team will be on the line to answer any questions about GitHub in government, what other government agencies have done, licensing, procurement, community building, you name it.
• @brntbeer from GitHub's training team will be on the line to answer questions about Git, GitHub for Windows/Mac, GitHub flow, GitHub.com, etc. Try to stump him. We dare you.
• @sroberts from GitHub's security team will be on line line to answer any questions you may have about keeping the bad guys out and fine tuning exactly who on your team has access to your code.

Questions?

Can't make it to the office hours? Got a burning question that can't wait? No worries. Just e-mail the government team at gov@github.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Register

Register today online. It's free and takes 30 seconds.

@benbalter, this looks cool. I signed up. I think its great that we also can ask questions at gov@github.com, but then of course the question/answer is private. Is there a public place to ask these type of questions, perhaps as issues on a github project, or on opendata.stackexchange.com? (I just posted a question there about github, licensing and US government employee generated code: http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/1046/github-license-for-code-written-by-us-government-employee) - Rich

I think its great that we also can ask questions at gov@github.com, but then of course the question/answer is private. Is there a public place to ask these type of questions, perhaps as issues on a github project, or on opendata.stackexchange.com?

That's an absolutely ✨ idea, and exactly the right question to be asking. Let me see what we can do to stand that up.

I just posted a question there about github, licensing and US government employee generated code

Looks like @konklone was pretty thurough, but two other resources are http://choosealicense.com, and this ongoing discussion on prooject open data: project-open-data/project-open-data.github.io#135 (comment)

Will there be a write up of questions asked and unanswered? Can't make the session, but would be great to read results afterwards!

@benbalter I'm happy to share my experience getting the Arlington County Board to approve use of the GPL with anyone interested.

Will there be a write up of questions asked and unanswered? Can't make the session, but would be great to read results afterwards!

@benrmatthews no worries. Will make sure to write up the FAQs and get them published.

@dbarlett I'd love to hear the story. 😄

@benbalter: enjoyed the office hours yesterday. Is the chat transcript avaiable? There were some interesting URLs and Q/A there. (for example, I can't remember where I'm supposed to request rendering of Ipython Notebook files (.ipynb) files) -Rich