| First, the basics: Add a description to every repository. Make sure every repository has an informative README. There are a ton of templates and generators out there, most are pretty good (if you find or create one that is especially useful for your agency, consider promoting it internally). Now comes the 'next level' stuff. If a project would be useful in an academic context, perhaps include a blurb on attributing a citation for it. There are a lot of folks out there looking for projects that will accept their contributions so they can build up some cred. Populate projects' issues with stuff you can tag as a good-first-issue, and your projects will start showing up in various aggregators (be judicious about selecting projects to do this for, you don't want issues and PRs languishing without being incorporated for lack of maintainer interest or time, that just looks worse). For projects that really are just being thrown over the transom, mark them clearly as such and invite friendly forks. Try to imagine who might find a particular project useful. Write that up as an example and incorporate it into the README or other documentation (eg. I imagine that anything related to stormwater runoff may be useful to civic planning departments, or perhaps environmental advocacy groups). Blog/tweet about the use case (your agency's comms team may be helpful here). I hope these suggestions help. |