No master branch (at time of writing)
We had an issue #37 that discussed getting rid of the default master branch.
What follows are Abby's comments suggesting the action that we've taken at this point, to have only a gh-pages branch. (Although there's a good chance that dev will arrive at some point!
On dev + master:
Yes, dev + master is a common development workflow and I think having some sort of dev branch is very smart! Great points @grprtkal & @KirstieJane.
The difference here (which @jvoytek has nicely pointed out) is that on GitHub, gh-pages is a magical branch that will also deploy your static site! It's powering your site here: http://kirstiejane.github.io/STEMMRoleModels/ and this makes it show up here, too: http://stemmrolemodels.com/
Given that you need gh-pages to power your current site, it doesn't make sense (to me) to continuously keep this up to date with your master branch. So, I suggested removing master altogether. I have no objections to adding dev if you want to!
On using a server instead of gh-pages:
Down the road, if you decide to use a server (for a database or server-side rendering, etc) then yes, you will outgrow gh-pages (and I ❤️ AWS, @jvoytek). Any server side development would ideally happen on a branch not named gh-pages, since it would break that magic. master would be an acceptable name.
On building your prototype on gh-pages:
However, given the scope of this project, I think you should be able to build a prototype web app on a static site (i.e. hosted completely gh-pages) using Google Spreadsheets / Google Forms / some fancy javascript.
Here's an example gh-pages site. Each 'Event Report' is taken from a google spreadsheet.
http://mozilla.github.io/clubs-events/
You can add a new 'Event Report' by filling out this form (go ahead! This is test data right now): https://docs.google.com/a/mozillafoundation.org/forms/d/1TxqagaZED7DqroHN8obx0yr9n3A3pwl84_46rTER91c/viewform?c=0&w=1
Here is all the code & some explanations: https://github.com/mozilla/clubs-events/
I would encourage you to go in this direction and learn from the example above since you already have a gh-pages site and google forms/sheets are relatively easy to use. This will get you up and running fairly quickly (I think luke built this in a week) - and the sooner you can show a working prototype to people, the better 😄
Note: If you have a contributor that is a database expert and can get you setup quickly, then by all means, skip the gh-pages site!
Sorry that was so long! I also wanted to say that I'm really impressed with how this work and community is coming together! There's been some amazing buzz and activity here, keep it up 👍 💯