user-guide

This is the user guide to the Building Energy Research Group (BERG) GitHub pages.

Introduction

The building-energy GitHub page is the organizational account for the Building Energy Research Group in the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering at Loughborough University in the UK.

This organizational account contains a number of GitHub repositories. You are currently in the user-guide repository and are viewing it's README file. A GitHub repository can store text files, programming scripts, data analysis procedures, software packages and websites - bascially anything which can be expressed in computer file format.

The BERG repositories contain work done as part of the research activities of the BERG group. This includes our research into building simulation, building energy modelling, low energy building design and data analysis of building performance.

The repositories are not designed to be 'finished articles' but rather 'work-in-progress'.

Why do we do this?

There are a number of reasons why BERG is using GitHub:

1. To showcase our research - in particular to make our research methods (such as modelling and data analysis) available to the wider research community.

2. To validate our methods - by sharing the methods, they can be tested and validated by others. This improves confidence, reliability and quality.

3. To speed up the development of new methods - GitHub repositories can be viewed by others who can then suggest improvements. Groups of researcher, all interested in the same field, can also work together on a GitHub repository to develop a shared resource.

4. To promote Open Science in our research - journal and conference papers can refer to GitHub repositories to demonstrate the methods used to generate a set of results. A GitHub repository which is used for a particular paper can also be transferred to the Loughborough University Data Repository which makes it a permanent, citable data object with a DOI.

For all users

Viewing and using the material

Anyone can view the public repositories on the building-energy GitHub page. Each repository should have a license file that describes the conditions for using the material in the repository.

Reporting problems and requesting new features.

Depending on the structure of the repository, it may be possible to raise an 'Issue' to report a bug or to request a new features.

Contributing

Repositories may encourage contributions to the content, for examply by 'forking' the repository and then issuing a 'pull request' once new material has been added.

For organization members

Private repositories

Organization members can create, view and contribute to 'private repositories'. Private repositories are not publically available but can be seen by other organization members. This allows development to occur which is not visible to external users. Of course, working with public repositories is always possible.

Creating a new repository

Feel free to create a new public or private repository. This could be for an existing set of materials, or it could be for a brand new idea. A repository could also be set up simply as an initial idea to see if anyone else is also interested in the concept.

Teams

It is possible to create teams within GitHub. A team can then be granted access to a particular repository to work together on it. Team access includes the ability to fork (i.e. to copy) and to push (i.e. to write) to a respository.