Building Blocks For HR Open Standards

Github is a great developer and collaboration tool, especially for HR Open’s distributed standards development projects. Although HR Open uses Github as intended, we wanted to share some notes on our usage guidelines within the workgroups.

Every workgroup is created based on a domain and each domain has its own repository. A complete list of domain repositories includes:

• Assessments
• Benefits
• Compensation
• Common*
• Interviewing
• Payroll
• Referrals
• Screening
• Timecard
• TSC Repositories*
• Wellness

* Managed by the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), these repositories are used for technical guidelines, tools, and other TSC related work.

The Common repository contains all of the shared information between the other domains. For example, all base data types (identifier, indicator, date, etc.) and all structures (person name, communication, organization, etc.) common to the workgroups are stored here to allow reuse of the shared components. This eliminates the need for multiple, similar structures and reduces development and maintenance time. So, before you create a new data type, check out the common repository to see if we already have the content!

Within each repository, we typically have a WIP folder for documentation and minutes, a JSON folder, and an XML folder. Within the two schema folders, you will find the noun and reusable schema, a top-level schema containing a list of all domain nouns, and a sample folder of all domain instances.

All workgroup members have read/write access to their domain repository and read access to the common repository. The TSC have read/write access to all repositories. Once the standards have been approved, they are released to the public for free.

If you’d like to learn more about our repositories or want to get involved, contact Kim Bartkus.