Get started on the team
Welcome to the GovWifi team!
Things all new starters need to do
These are things that everyone who joins the team needs to do, whatever your role is.
Learn about GovWifi
Here are a few pointers to help you understand the GovWifi service:
- the About GovWifi page
- product pages
- tech docs for organisations
- past user research
- decision logs
- our support model
There’s also information about the GovWifi team and our ways of working.
Sign up for a GovWifi account
The best way to understand the service is to use it yourself.
You do not need to be in a public sector building to get your sign in details - although you do need to be in one to connect to the internet using GovWifi.
Follow the instructions to create your GovWifi account.
Get a GovWifi admin account
Ask a team member to invite you to create a GovWifi admin account. This lets you see what organisations who offer GovWifi in their buildings can see.
You should also ask to be added to: - GovWifi admin staging environment - GovWifi ‘Super admins’ - this is a set of enhanced permissions that lets us oversee organisations using the service
Check your permissions
If you do not have any of the following permissions, ask the delivery manager or tech lead.
You should have access to:
- the GovWifi Trello team and boards
- the team Google drive
- Zendesk - you should be added to the [2nd/3rd Line – Zendesk Administration] view
You should be in these Google groups:
- GovWifi Core Team
- GovWifi-support
You should be in these Slack channels:
#govwifi-core-team#govwifi
Depending on your role, you may also need access to:
- GovWifi’s Notify account
- GovWifi’s Notify staging account
- Google analytics
- the GovWifi-Critical-Alerts Google group
- the GovWifi-Feedback Google group
If you need to use Github, ask the tech lead to add you to the alphagov organisation and the GovWifi team. The main GovWifi repositories are listed on the Learn about the GovWifi applications page. There are further instructions on each repository.
The Tech Lead has the Github privileges to add new team members to the alphagov organisation and relevant GovWifi Github teams. If the Tech Lead changes, these privileges must be transferred to the new Tech Lead. It’s important to email the gds-github-owners Google group notifying them that a new Github organisation admin has been added and also add the new Tech Lead to the Google group.
Things developers need access to
As well as the things that everyone needs to do, there are extra things that new developers need.
You need access to the GovWifi-DevOps Google group.
Infrastructure
- Request an AWS account. Once you have an account, ask in the #govwifi Slack channel to be added to the GovWifi AWS account.
- Set up your access to the infrastructure - this includes access to databases and ssh.
- Create a GOV.UK Platform as a Service account. Once you have an account, ask the tech lead to add you to the GovWifi organisation.
Secrets
You need to get access to shared secrets.
Monitoring and CI/CD tools
You need access to:
- AWS Accounts (Production, Staging, Development & Tools)
- Sentry SaaS
- Alerts and logs in Cloudwatch