GitHub Organizations

How Data Science Undergraduate Studies (DSUS) Uses GitHub Organizations

DSUS has a GitHub Enterprise instance. DSUS is willing to house non-DATA class organizations if there is a need.

DSUS has one GitHub Organization per class. For courses using DataHub, typically there are three repositories created each semester:

  • Semester Website. This public repository holds the Jekyll website for a single semester. Typically named semYY: spYY | suYY | faYY.
  • Student Materials. This public repository holds the Jupyter Notebooks for all components of the course including lectures and student assignments. Student assignments are usually the output of running otter assign. Each course has their own naming philosphy, but commonly semYY-student or semYY-materials
  • Unreleased Materials. This private repository is used for development of Jupyter Notebooks and other assignments. These repositories are typically named semYY-dev or materials-semYY-private and may hold solutions to assignments. This repository is where otter assign is run.

We recommend two materials repositories for assignment distribution workflows that utilize nbgitpuller to distribute assignments to complete on the DataHub. nbgitpuller will pull all materials from a repository onto the DataHub, so assignments that are not ready to distribute and solutions absolutely should not be in the repository used to generate nbgitpuller links. Additionally, classes have run into issues in the past with nbgitpuller’s automatic merge behavior so we highly recommend that materials are only added to the Student Materials repository once they are 100% completely finalized.

Because nbgitpuller will pull all materials from a repository, we recommend that the Student Materials repository is as lean as possible. Do not add any extraneous files that are not needed for students to complete their assignments to this repository in order to save costs on the DataHub.

Other repositories in these organizations include exams, private grading repositories (grading scripts and no student data), textbooks, and guides.

Each semester, course staff that need access are added to a GitHub Team. You can control access to repositories via teams; there is no need to add individuals to repositories. We’ve found it useful to have an “admin” team with higher levels of access (anything beyond “write”). You may also consider multiple teams per semester with varying levels of access to various repositories; for example, a “dev only” team may be useful.