GitHub - Asynchronous Communications

Central to our information storage and sharing, our GitHub repositories serve as the primary hub for project-related documents, community resources, and collaborative outputs from Working Groups, community events, and different kinds of events, offering transparency and collaboration for both synchronous and asynchronous communication.

All Technical Partners and Pathfinder teams use the GitHub organisation for sharing and maintaining their projects and project management resources.

Established by the OSPO Now team in collaboration with the APHRC team, the GitHub organisation enables the DSWB community to share their work as it develops, rather than only at the end. Open-source GitHub repositories (shared under a permissive license) allow all members to view, refer to, and reproduce resources even when they are not directly involved in the development of the original work. This accelerates problem-solving and the reuse of resources developed within DSWB.

Repositories created under the DSWB GitHub organisation are maintained by the repository owners and managers. All public resources will be shared under a permissive license and follow the DSWB Data Sharing Agreement.

Introductory References¶

If you are new to Github, you can follow this short video from GitHub for creating your first repository and other basic features you can use.

For details, please refer to these resources for introduction to GitHub:

• General introduction: OLS Community (2024, December 3). Open Seeds OLS-9 Week-5 Content - Version Control and GitHub for Collaboration - Skill Up. Zenodo. Community (2024)
• Guidance for using the DSWB Organisation: Onyewuchi, P., & Sharan, M. (2025, January 30). Introduction to GitHub. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14775540*
• The Turing Way Chapter on Getting Started With GitHub: https://book.the-turing-way.org/collaboration/github-novice. The Turing Way Community. (2025). The Turing Way: A handbook for reproducible, ethical and collaborative research (1.2.3). Zenodo. The Turing Way Community (2025)

Using GitHub Issues and Pull Requests¶

GitHub issues and GitHub discussions serve as a dynamic space where updates, queries, and discussions take place. The GitHub issues and project boards allow the project delivery team to share information related to specific topics, maintaining transparency among community members. These features ensure that even individuals not actively participating in a conversation can stay informed about ongoing developments and contribute where they can. Contributors can respond in real-time, but the system is mainly used to accommodate varying time zones, allowing participants to engage at their convenience.

When soliciting feedback, adding clear titles, mentioning the relevant people, and indicating timelines helps improve engagement. These issues can be cross-posted on other communication channels to boost their visibility.

Some examples of when issues and discussions can be used for communication purposes are the following:

• Inviting community inputs, ideas, and feedback
• Keeping a record of an ongoing project
• Maintaining transparency and access to ongoing work

To indicate the specific nature of the issue/discussion, we also use words such as [TALK], [INVITATION], and [FEEDBACK NEEDED] (in square brackets) before writing the full title.

You can learn about other cool features when using issue in this video.

Organising Issues in Project Boards¶

Projects boards on GitHub is a good way to organise and prioritise different issues (task lists) either related to a single GitHub repository, or from across different repositories such as demonstrated in the DSWB organisation](https://github.com/orgs/aphrc-dswb/projects).

Main steps for creating a project are the following that you can follow by watching this video tutorial:

• On the DSWB GitHub organisation, you can find a tab “Projects” that enables you to view all current projects board and make a “New Project”
• Create a new project by providing a name and a description for your project
• You can use “Basic Kanban” that offers all necessary columns, such as to do, in progress and done.
• You can add new columns, like backlog or wishlist, as needed
• Now you can link all issues associated with your project. You can always add new issues and link repositories to your project later on.

You can follow more GitHub’s YouTube videos for additional features.

References for Project Management¶

• Introduction to Project Boards for DSWB: Sharan (2025) (cite as: Sharan, M. (2025, January 30). Project Management tips and tools. Zenodo. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.14775653.)
• Orgnising projects in GitHub
• Project Management Frameworks Overview