Onboarding checklist

When someone new joins the team:

• Create a new GitHub issue in this repository called Onboard [NewPerson] to NRRD website project team.
• View the raw source of this file.
• Copy everything below the line into the new issue's body.
• Replace NewPerson with the new person's name.
• Replace Buddy with the onboarding buddy's name.
• Delete any checklists irrelevant for the new person's skill domain.
• Submit the issue.
• Assign the issue to the person who volunteered to be the new person's Onboarding Buddy.

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In order to get [NewPerson] productively contributing to the NRRD website team, [Buddy] should help [NewPerson] complete a prescribed set of tasks that will bring them up to speed.

Directions

Buddy: If you can’t complete any of the items on your checklist personally, you are responsible for ensuring that someone with the correct access completes that item.

New Person: Take judicious notes on what about this onboarding process or the NRRD website is confusing or frustrating. If you notice a problem (especially with things like documentation), you are more than welcome to fix it! At the very least, please share this information with your buddy so we can make the team/platform better. You can also file issues and pull requests as soon as you feel comfortable doing so.

Learn about the project background and how the team works

• Read the Product Framing document

• Read about the current status of the project on the homepage of the wiki

• Buddy: Add NewPerson to the project team list

• Read the Basics for making distributed work work

• Meet with the Product Manager for an introduction to project routines, expectations, and rituals

  • Discuss NRRD project meetings: what they are, how they are run, and how the new person is expected to participate at each
  • Review the most recent NRRD project roadmap to get a high-level view of recently-completed, in-progress, and upcoming features

Get access to tools and services

• Buddy: Ask the 18F team PM to invite NewPerson to the #nrrd-partners slack channel

  • NewPerson: Accept the slack invitation via email, and set up your Slack account with 2-factor authentication. Set up your profile with your name, location, and any other information you wish to provide.

• Create a GitHub account that you can use for government work
  GitHub is a platform for collaborative web development. The NRRD website’s repository is currently housed under 18F’s GitHub organization, but in the future it will be transferred to ONRR. While it’s under 18F, accounts must follow 18F’s GitHub profile guidelines in order for team members to be added to it.

  • Follow 18F’s setup instructions to create a GitHub account, or link an existing account to your government work.
  • Let the Product Manager know when your account has been created, and what your username is. Ask them to add you as a contributor to the project repository so that you can make contributions, and to add you to the DOI GitHub organization.
  • Subscribe to the doi-extractives-data repository (through the GitHub watch feature) to get notifications of project activity.

• Log in to Waffle with your GitHub account so that you can view the project planning board
  Select the “Public Repos Only” option when prompted to log in. We use Waffle as a project management tool to track tasks. Waffle connects to GitHub and displays the issues from the the project’s repository in columns that show its progress—Icebox, Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, In Progress, Awaiting Review, or Done.

Design checklist

• Read the design principles for the NRRD site
  On the front page of the style guide

• Learn about our user research practice
  Our research plans and findings are documented in the open as part of our GitHub repository. You can find the research at any time by changing the branch in the repo to the “research” branch.

  • Read about our NRRD's Research norms and processes
  • Read through the research work from a few recent sprints. Each sprint has its own folder that contains a plan and the results:
    • Research and findings from sprint 14
    • Research and findings from sprint 13
    • Read through the rest at your own pace

  You can find everything together in the branch index: https://github.com/18F/doi-extractives-data/tree/research

• Read about how to design with NRRD data

• Review the NRRD design system and style guide
  A collection of interaction and design patterns used across the site and the style rules that determine the site’s visual identity.

• Review the content guide to get a sense of how to write and talk about NRRD content

• If you are new to GitHub, learn about how it works, and how to make it work for you
  GitHub is traditionally a development tool, not a design tool. It may take some time and experimenting to figure out how to work within its framework as a designer. Some places to start:

  • Understand the GitHub workflow that code-based changes to the website go through.
    Even if you won’t be contributing code changes, it helps to share the same vocabulary as your team.
  • Learn about GitHub issues
    Issues are how the team tracks tasks to work on or bugs to fix.
  • Understand the basics of writing in Markdown
    Markdown is a lightweight way of creating formatting for text. Using certain characters tells the text to render as headlines, bullets, etc. It will be helpful to know the basics of Markdown because GitHub uses it as the default syntax for writing issues (although they have recently implemented a WYSIWYG toolbar that helps!)

• Learn about what you need to know about doing design and research in the federal government

• Get access to Adobe design tools so that you can access the design files if you need them
  The visual assets and layouts for the site were originally designed by the 18F team using a tool called Sketch, which is only compatible with Mac operating systems. The NRRD team uses Windows operating systems, and Adobe design products. Over the course of the product’s transition from 18F to NRRD, we’ve been converting files to Adobe Illustrator as needed. For now, the native design files live in Google Drive, until a better approach can be identified.

• Join the UX Community of Practice email listserv (optional)
  A mailing list of fellow UX designers across government. Useful for sharing resources and learning about challenges shared by other practitioners. Anyone with a government email address can join by sending a request to UX-COP-request@LISTSERV.GSA.GOV

Development checklist

Content to come