Welcome to the GitHub organisation for the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. This page is for members and outlines what this organisation is for and how to use it.

This organisation hosts valuable code and other assets produced across the Department of Electrical Engineering, spanning teaching, research and departmental tooling. It is the recommended place for staff and postgraduate students to store, version and share work that is well suited to git-based version control.

This organisation is not intended as a personal storage space, nor for hosting throwaway proof-of-concept or experimental projects. Please use your own personal GitHub account for such purposes, even when collaborating with other members of the department.

Membership of this organisation is restricted to EEE staff and postgraduate students. Undergraduates and other external collaborators should be added as collaborators to individual repositories, or to a team, as required. Course conveners may add an undergraduate cohort to teaching repositories through a course team for the duration of a course.

Supervisors may make an exception for final-year undergraduate students who will continue to work on a project as a postgraduate student.

Because this is a department-wide organisation, course materials are one of its primary uses. This includes lecture notes, LaTeX sources, tutorial and problem sets, and other teaching assets.

• Group each course under a clearly named team (for example EEE2046F) and grant access through that team rather than to individuals.
• Keep student submissions, marks, EMPL IDs and other personal information out of repositories. These are sensitive and are not appropriate for git hosting. See Appropriate Contents.
• Memoranda, unreleased assessments and other material that must not reach students should live in private repositories with access limited to the teaching team.
• Archive a course repository when a course is retired or substantially restructured, so that the active version is unambiguous.

This code of conduct outlines the required practices for data management and repository standards. It also outlines the transfer of ownership of valuable code and data from students to the university.

The scope of this is limited to this UCT EEE Department GitHub organisation and its repositories. It does not apply to any other departmental assets or intellectual property hosted elsewhere.

Repository-based development is a core skill of modern engineering. All repositories in this organisation should, in general, be maintained to an above-average standard.

In the spirit of open collaboration, staff and students are encouraged to publish their repositories publicly whenever possible. Public repositories will however be held to a very high standard, as they are a reflection of the department and the university. They should be well documented, have a clear purpose, be reproducible and be useful to others. They should be considered a publication in their own right.

As a bare minimum, public repositories should have the following:

• A README.md file that outlines the purpose of the repository, how to use it, and other essential information.
• A LICENSE file that describes the licence under which the repository is released.

• An appropriate GitHub description, topics and other settings to make the repository discoverable.
• Marked as archived if it is no longer maintained, for example after a student has graduated or a course has been retired.

Any public repository that does not meet these standards may be made private during regular audits. In rare instances, ownership may be pushed back to the contributor. Note that only organisational administrators can change the visibility of, delete or transfer repositories in this organisation.

Private repositories are intended for code and other assets that are valuable but not suitable for sharing publicly. This includes:

• Unpublished research data.
• Code, models, algorithms, designs and other assets that are proprietary, confidential, in a patent process or for whatever reason cannot be in the public domain.
• Unreleased assessments, memoranda and other teaching material that must not reach students.
• Personal information and other content sensitive to ethical and legal considerations.
• Property co-owned with external collaborators without explicit agreement to share publicly.
• Any other information that is valuable but not suitable for sharing publicly.

Although private repositories are not held to the same standard as public repositories, they should still be well maintained and useful to future members. Private repositories are visible to all members of the organisation. To limit clutter, repositories still in early development should only be placed here if truly necessary. Otherwise, please develop within your personal GitHub account until transferring ownership once done.

Any research or teaching work conducted in collaboration with internal or external partners that involves git-based repositories hosted outside of this organisation should still be mirrored within this organisation where the department retains an interest in it.

Repositories in this organisation should only contain code and other assets that are appropriate for git-based version control. This includes:

• Code.
• Most forms of experimental data.
• Documentation, markdown and simple webpages.
• LaTeX documents.
• Other text-based assets, for example KiCad projects.

Repositories should not contain:

• Large binary files that are frequently modified, for example images, videos, audio and build outputs.
• Personal information, including student marks and identifiers, and other content sensitive to ethical and legal considerations.
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other proprietary file-format documents.
• Content with absolute paths or other constraints that tie it to a local file system.
• Extremely large amounts of data.

Please maintain a .gitignore file in your repository to exclude inappropriate files from being pushed to the remote.

All UCT projects are governed by the UCT Intellectual Property Policy. In general, all code and data generated as part of a research project is the property of UCT. The department implements this for valuable GitHub-hosted IP by transferring ownership from the student to the departmental organisational account before or upon graduation. This ensures that the code and data is maintained and accessible to future researchers and students.

This can be done by either:

• Transferring ownership via the GitHub interface. https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managing-repositories/transferring-a-repository
• Creating a new remote within this organisation and pushing the code to the new remote.

cd /path/to/your/repo
gh repo create uct-eee-department/$REPO_NAME_HERE --source . --remote uct --private --push

Not all code and data generated as part of a project is valuable. This should be determined between the student and their supervisor, or between staff for teaching material. If the code and data is not valuable, it should not be hosted in this organisation.

Students may maintain their own remote, especially if work is still in progress, or fork back into their personal GitHub account if they wish to continue working on it independently long-term. This is a good way to keep a personal copy for future reference, especially if the original is made private in this organisation.

By default, members will be removed from the organisation upon graduation, or when otherwise deregistered from or no longer employed by UCT. This keeps the organisation membership up to date and easy to maintain.

Almost all projects and courses involve more than one person. The recommended approach is to create a team for each project or course, add the relevant members to that team, and assign repository privileges to the team rather than to each individual. This allows fine-grained access control to be applied consistently.

Members and teams should be granted the minimum permissions required to perform their duties. This keeps the organisation secure and reduces the risk of members accidentally performing actions they are not authorised to do.

Creators of teams and repositories are granted admin permissions by default, and are expected to maintain that resource appropriately. Organisational administrators will only exercise repository-level actions when necessary, and are not responsible for administering individual repositories and teams.

Should you require additional repository permissions, please contact one of the repository administrators, failing which you can ask an organisational administrator.

The organisation will be audited on a regular basis by the administrators to ensure that it remains secure and that repositories are well maintained. This may be done at any time without notice.

The default action of these audits is to archive stale repositories, and to make private any public repositories that do not adhere to the standards outlined in this document. Any other actions may be taken as required, or otherwise assigned via a repository issue.

Repositories should only be deleted if:

• The repository is empty or has thoroughly been determined to have no value.
• The repository has been duplicated or otherwise moved.
• There is a legal or ethical reason to do so.

Before doing so, any past contributors still present within the university should be informed of the intent to delete the repository. An organisational administrator may then exercise this deletion.

The following are administrators of this organisation:

• Robyn Verrinder - robyn.verrinder@uct.ac.za