Employee Handbook

Basic Tech Details

Project Infrastructure

In general, our projects use a combination of technical infrastructure for tracking progress and maintaining communication. Subversion is used to maintain any code associated with the project. Trac is used to provide a project wiki, collect project tasks as tickets, and display activity and resources in subversion. We generally set up at least one email list associated with a project as well.

Detail:

• Trac/Subversion setup
•  Email list setup
•  The TracHours plugin was developed by TOPP labs that we use to track time. See also  the usage HOWTO

Email

Client Setup

Get Scott or someone to set up an address for you. If you have the address username@…, this means that you can send/receive mail as username@….

• Server type: IMAP
• Incoming: mail.openplans.org (port 143)
• Outgoing: mail.openplans.org (port 587)
• Username: username (no @opengeo.org)
• Security: TLS

Forwarding

If you prefer to have your email forwarded to an external account you can contact Scott or Myron.

Web Mail

Use the web mail client at  http://webmail.opengeo.org. This will redirect to a site that uses a self-signed certificate. Your browser will likely warn you that the identity of this certificate issuer cannot be confirmed. You can add an exception so you don't have to view this warning in the future.

Signatures

We use creative signatures at the end of our emails. Those signatures generally look like the following:

--
John Q. Employee
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Some descriptive tag line.

Suggested tag lines:

• Expert service straight from the developers.
• Enterprise support for the open source geospatial stack.

But you are free to come up with your own. Please conform to the following email signature specification.

1. Shall include the name OpenGeo
2. Shall include a link to  http://opengeo.org
3. Should include a short description of OpenGeo
4. May include title, phone, etc.

To use an email signature with Thunderbird, save your signature (excluding the -- line) somewhere and call it signature.txt (or any other .txt). Then under Tools > Account Settings ..., find the checkbox to attach a signature and browse to your signature.txt. More detail on signatures in Thunderbird can be found on the  web.

Mailing Lists

See the mailing list how-to? for detail on setting up new mailing lists. In general, you can subscribe to a list by sending a message with the subject "subscribe" to the list address.

All OpenGeo employees should subscribe to the following mailing lists::

•  OpenGeo Team Publicly archived list for standard discussions.
•  OpenGeo Biz (Login required) Private list for business discussion.

Targeting specific teams via email

The OpenGeo Team mailing list contains many people, and sometimes a message need not be directed towards everyone on the list. In lieu of creating unnecessary mailing lists, please use the following prefixes in your subject lines to target specific teams.

• #gs - GeoServer team
• #js - JavaScript team
• #or - Outreach team
• #biz - Business team

IRC

In addition to conversation carried out via email, on the phone, and in person, we use IRC for OpenGeo related conversation. The  #opengeo channel is open to all and is a good place to have quick chats with co-workers. The georj bot hangs out in #opengeo. You can find some detail on interacting with georj on the how-to page.

All conversation on the #opengeo channel is publicly logged. You can browse these logs at  http://irc.opengeo.org/log/. If you have something to say that you don't want logged, you can wrap it in {{double curly braces}}.

Conference Calling

We can make conference calls using the following details:

• 917-388-9050 (from within the NYC office, it may be required to only dial 9050, not the full number)
• conf #: area code twice
• passcode: office zip

EE Process

Process for EE contracts

Blogging

The team that slogs together, blogs together! HowTo/Blogging

Priority Emails

Weekly 'Priority Emails' are expected from everyone, to report on how the last week went and the plans for the coming week.

For details see HowTo/PriorityEmails

Other Org Details (Benefits, Contact Info, Process)

For details on things related to all TOPP employees, see the  TOPP Office project page on OpenPlans.