Roles in the GitHub organisation

This is an overview of the roles Digg uses on the GitHub organisation, together with their responsibilities and permissions.

Overview of roles

Owner — super-administrators of the organisation itself.
Member — anyone invited to the organisation. Should be added to one or more Teams for access to specific repositories or projects.
External Collaborator — external users who have not been invited to the organisation but are granted individual permissions to specific projects.

A GitHub Organisation can have more roles than these three. See organisation roles.

The Member role

Member has in turn a number of finer roles that govern what the user can do in a repository. Examples are admin, maintain and read. See repository roles.

The Admin role and its responsibilities

Every repository MUST have one or more users in the Admin role. An Admin in a team must have overall oversight and knowledge of their project and:

take responsibility for acting on, or delegating responsibility for, their team’s or their own:
- security alerts
- removing users from the team who are inactive
- keeping full control of who has, for example, write permissions in the project.
take responsibility for the project’s overall health by following recommended conventions. See Working on GitHub: Links.
be the team’s or individual’s first contact point with Owners for administrative matters as needed. Contact OSPO in the first instance.
as Admin — always ask if you are unsure.

The External Collaborator role

External Collaborator is a GitHub role that grants an external user specific permissions on a single repository without making them a member of the organisation.

Each member of a GitHub Organisation costs a licence, so Digg avoids adding users to Teams where it is not needed. External Collaborator is one option when an external person needs write permissions on a specific project — but not always the right choice.

General notes on roles

For public projects, external contributors do not need to belong to a team or have the External Collaborator role. They can contribute via pull requests and forks, just as in any other open source project.