Onboarding Offboarding

Welcome! This document describes the onboarding/offboarding process for new team members on Data.gov. You'll learn mostly from pairing and interaction with your teammates, but here are some handy resources to get you started. We'll create a GitHub issue to track your onboarding tasks, which will get you access to all accounts and resources you'll need for day-to-day work.

Required Reading List

Team members are required to read these. In some cases, they describe essential processes of Data.gov required by law.

• Code of Conduct
• CONTRIBUTING
• Data.gov Account Management policy
• Data.gov Incident Response procedures
• Data.gov Contingency Plan procedures

Resources

These resources are optional but helpful background reading. Knowing these exist is good so you can reach for them when needed.

• TTS Handbook contains useful information about TTS, how we work, and tools we use.
• data.gov is our primary GitHub repository. This is where we create issues and track them on kanban boards.
• The GitHub repositories for each of Data.gov's main applications:
  • Data.gov GitHub Repositories and Dependency spreadsheet track our many GitHub repositories.
  • datagov-catalog (current catalog -- catalog.data.gov)
  • catalog.data.gov (legacy catalog -- catalog-old.data.gov, maintained through fall 2026)
  • datagov-harvester (harvest.data.gov)
  • inventory-app (inventory.data.gov)
  • datagov-website (www.data.gov)
  • resources.data.gov
  • data-strategy (strategy.data.gov)
  • Data.gov Account Management repository used to track account requests for Data.gov components.
  • Data.gov Incident Response repository for tracking sensitive work including vulnerabilities, incidents, and bug bounty reports.
• The Runbook describes common actions and procedures for the operation of Data.gov.
• Kanban board used for planning and tracking work.
• Data.gov Team Drive is the main drive we use for sharing non-sensitive documents.
• Data.gov System Security Plans -- within the Data.gov Shared Google Drive, under Security & Compliance > SSPs
• How to get your open data on Data.gov describes how agencies get their data onto Data.gov.
• Summary of the Open Government Data Act.
• Summary of the Geospatial Data Act.
• Geoplatform.gov run by FGDC.

Checklists

The checklists contain tasks for you and your onboarding buddy to get you started quickly. They're implemented as GitHub Issue Templates so that we can track onboarding progress in GitHub.

• Onboarding checklist
• Offboarding checklist