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@worldbank World Bank

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g4brielvs
Oct 4, 2023

Hey there, World Bank community!

We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions about Project Templates! Use this discussion thread to share your feedback, report any issues, or tell us your thoughts about project templates, including about ongoing initiatives, such as:

We can't wait to see how Project Templates will empower you to manage your projects more effectively. Let's make collaboration easier and more efficient together!

What Are Project Templates?

Project Templates are a powerful way to kickstart your projects with predefined structures, issue templates, and automation workflows. Whether you're working on a software development project or managing any team-based task, these templates will save you time and help you maintain consistency across your projects.

How Do Project Templates Work?

  • Create Custom Templates: You can create custom project templates tailored to your specific needs. Define the structure of your project boards, add issue templates with predefined labels, assignees, and workflows.

  • Easily Duplicate Projects: Once you've created a template, you can use it as a blueprint for new projects. No more starting from scratch - simply duplicate the template, and your new project is ready to go.

  • Stay Organized: With Project Templates, you can keep your project management consistent and organized. Track progress, manage tasks, and collaborate with your team seamlessly.

Why Use Project Templates?

  1. Efficiency: Save time on setting up new projects.
  2. Consistency: Ensure that your projects follow the same structure and best practices every time.
  3. Collaboration: Streamline collaboration by providing your team with a predefined framework.
  4. Flexibility: Customize templates to suit your unique project requirements.
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kbjarkefur
Oct 5, 2023
Maintainer

Hi @g4brielvs and the World Bank community!

Sorry for a lengthy response but since you link to some DIME products I want to give some context and share our lessons learned from them.

The DIME repo template
We experimented with templates a while back and at that time created https://github.com/dime-worldbank/dime-template-repo. We landed in that there were too much heterogeneity in DIME projects to find a good single template that would in all cases be more helpful than confusing. To give one example. A Code of Conduct is important in a public repo, but it is not needed for a private repo. A team new to GitHub might might be confused by a file like this wondering if they can start to use their repo before they have discussed and agreed to that content. Anyone can still use our experimentation template for what it is worth, but we have not touched it in years, and it is mostly empty.

What we do instead at DIME
Regarding repo creation, we decided to create repos with only a template .gitignore file (and the initial commit README.md). Please check out DIME's ignore template. It use a trick so the logic is inversed. Instead of listing what to ignore, it lists what to not ignore. This makes it easy to create one template for projects using many different languages. Although I am sure this is colored by the use case most common at DIME which is a private repo for a research project intended for a future publication.

Our DIME repo template could have been just that ignore file but we found it annoying that a repo created from a template will always have the name of the template under the repo name (see here and here). If a template is a great fit, then this is not a big issue, but since we are only adding a ignore file we decided that it was easy to do that since we have to go to the repo to set up user access anyways.

The Quarto template
The https://dime-worldbank.github.io/quarto-dime-theme is a template for Quarto projects. It is very new and has not been widely circulated yet, but feedback that has that in mind is welcomed.

Summarizing this in the context of you questions
Similarly to what you are suggesting above and what was suggested in comments in your great session yesterday I think it is hard to have a one-size-fits-all template for all the type of work World Bank teams use GitHub for. I think a collection of templates would be a great long-term goal where each template has a helpful description of what is intended to be and what it is not intended to be. And the templates should be organized around use cases rather than language. As you said, the template you have created can use R but many R users have a different type of project in mind (which you also said). Would it make sense to catalogue these templates in a shared location?

Furthermore, I wonder what the community thinks about using templates vs. tools like usethis. When tools like that exists and is a good fit, it is great as a community larger than the community is contributing to it. But since those tools will never be as tailored to the use case of a public WB repo as a WB hosted template would be. I think both have a role to play but not sure what a good rule-of-thumb would be where a template is better and a tool like that is better.

DIME is happy to collaborate on this.
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@g4brielvs
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g4brielvs Nov 28, 2023
Author

@kbjarkefur No need to apologize! Your insights and experiences with DIME's repository templates are incredibly valuable. It's evident that finding a one-size-fits-all template can be challenging due to the diversity of projects and needs within an organization like the World Bank.

Regarding your observation about the Quarto template, organizing templates around use cases rather than language sounds promising. A collection of templates with clear descriptions of their intended use and limitations would indeed provide more flexibility and guidance to users.

Collaboration on this front seems immensely beneficial. DIME's experience and insights could significantly contribute to refining the approach towards repository templates and best practices within the World Bank's GitHub community.

Would you be interested in discussing this further in a dedicated forum or meeting to explore potential strategies for cataloging and organizing these templates? Your input in shaping these practices for the broader community would be invaluable.
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