Starting your own Unit

Some guidelines we recommend before starting your own Unit:

Does your Unit have a well-defined objective?

A Unit that serves a specific objective helps guide its decisions and activities quite nicely. It gives you an easy heuristic to evaluate how well your doing. Just ask yourself: "Is my Unit meeting my stated objective?".

Is there already a Unit that aligns with those objectives? What new thing does your Unit bring to the table?

We favour joining an existing Unit rather than the creation of a new Unit that will fragment a community.

With those two out of the way, make sure you have fulfilled these requirements:

  • At least three active members to start with.

    There is no upper bound to the number of members of course.

  • A publicly available organisation page.

    • This can be a website, GitHub or GitLab organisation, or any platform that can host your activities, and from which people can learn about your Unit.

    You will be responsible for your own branding and expression. As a Unit, you have full autonomy over everything you do and how your community is managed, the only caveat being,

  • You must adopt a properly enforced Code of Conduct.

    We have made this easy for you. If you do not explicitly create or adopt your own Code of Conduct, our Unit Code of Conduct will apply to your Unit. You must have your Code of Conduct publicly accessible in your Unit's organisation page.

  • You must have a public email address associated with your Unit.

    This is to ensure that you can be contacted reliably, and also so that people have an outlet to report Code of Conduct violations.

How can you create your Unit?

If you've decided on a Code of Conduct that would be enforced within your Unit, to "officially" create it, all you would need to do is send in a PR adding the following information about your Unit to the Active Units page:

  • A link to your GitHub/GitLab/etc organisation.
  • A link to your Code of Conduct (if you choose to adopt the Unit Code of Conduct, link that).
  • Information about your Unit in terms of:
    • Who you are. Ex: if you're a college club mention that, if you're a group of like minded people mention that, etc.
    • What goals do you have.
      • Make sure that you've browsed the list of already active Units and what their goals are.

This is solely for the purposes of making information about your Unit accessible to the public.