Course: Computational Thinking for Governance Analytics

Prof. José Manuel Magallanes, PhD

  • Visiting Professor of Computational Policy at Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, and eScience Institute Senior Data Science Fellow, University of Washington.
  • Professor of Government and Political Methodology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. _____

Session 1: Project Setup

Follow these steps:

  1. Go to GITHUB and create an account.
  2. Sign into your GITHUB account and create a repository (repo). Consider this while creating your repo:
    • You should give it a simple yet very descriptive name. GITHUB is very flexible on this.
    • Don’t forget to create a README file with a description, GITHUB will ask you for it while you create it.
    • Your repo will be public, unless you want to pay for a private repo.
    • You do not need to choose a license; but if you are willing to, I recommend CC-BY-SA-4.0. Here you can find a n easy explanation of this kind of license.
  3. Go to GITHUB DESKTOP and download the client application for your computer. Open the client and sign into it, this will connect your computer to GITHUB, in order to synchronize your contents in your machine and in the cloud.
  4. Go to your repo and clone it to your desktop. This means your repo will become a folder in your machine.

From now on, everything you do in your machine, related to this course, should be in that folder. If your GITHUB client is open, it will tell you when some content in the folder has been altered, so that you synchronize your GITHUB contents in the cloud as needed.