Graduation and offboarding

Graduation and Offboarding

Membership turns over every year, and departing members lose their UCT accounts. Without a deliberate handover, valuable work is lost and intellectual property is never transferred. Run this checklist when a student submits, or when any member is about to leave. The supervisor is responsible for seeing it through.

Before the member leaves

Decide with the member which repositories are valuable. Not everything is, and only valuable work should stay in the organisation.

For each valuable repository:

• Transfer it into the organisation if it is not already here. See Transferring a Repository.
• Check that it has a current README.md, and a LICENSE if it is public.
• Confirm that no personal data, credentials or large binaries were ever committed. Check the history, not just the current files.
• Archive it if the work is complete, so that it is clearly finished and read-only.

For anything not valuable, leave it on the member's personal account. It does not belong here.

Handover

• Make sure at least one continuing member has admin access to each transferred repository, so nothing is orphaned when the account goes.
• Move any documentation the member kept elsewhere into the repository or the wiki.
• If the member wants to keep working on a project independently, they can fork it back to their personal account.

Removing access

• Remove the member from the teams they belonged to.
• Membership is ordinarily removed on graduation or deregistration. Confirm this has happened.

A note for the departing member

Forking a repository back to your personal account is a good way to keep a copy for your portfolio or future reference, especially if the original is later made private. Do this before you lose access.