Introducing Organizations

Today we’re introducing Organizations. Organizations simplify management of group-owned repositories (for example: your company’s code), expand on our permissions system, and help focus your GitHub workflow for business and large open source projects.

If you’ve ever had to manage multiple GitHub accounts, desired a company-specific dashboard, wanted to add read-only collaborators, or needed to give someone else administrative control over one of your repositories, you’re going to love Organizations.

And just like the rest of GitHub, Organizations are free for open source.

A home for your organization’s code

Creating an organization helps you centralize your organization’s code. All repositories live under the organization, and billing goes through a central organization account.

Any owner of an organization may edit that organization’s settings, from profile details to billing information.

Next generation permissions control

Teams give people access to the organization’s code, making it easy to add or remove people to many repositories at once.

Here are all the teams in the dolores organization:

Each team has one of three levels of permission:

• Pull Only – This new permission level is useful when you want to give people access to see the code, participate in private issues/wikis, or work in their private fork. These members may not push to the organization owned repository.
• Pull+Push – This is the default permission that collaborators have on GitHub right now. These members can participate in the project and push code, but they may not change the repository’s meta data (name, private/public status, teams, service hooks).
• Pull+Push+Administrative – This new permission level allows you to grant participatory, push and administrative permissions. These members can do anything a repository owner can do.

Both users and repositories may be added to teams by owners, and you can make as many teams as you want.

Focus on your organization

Each organization you belong to has its own dashboard context. Within this context, you’ll see events pertinent to the organization as well as the repositories that belong to the organization (that you have access to).

Contexts are sticky. Once you’ve selected a context, clicking the GitHub logo or any “dashboard” link will bring you back the your context. Select your name from the dropdown to get back to your personal dashboard.

Dashboard contexts are all about focus. Come to work, switch to your company’s context — go home, switch back to your personal context.

Want to see an organization repo in your personal context? Watch it.

Forking friendly

Organizations know all about forks. If you have the power to create new repositories on behalf of the organization (that is, you’re an owner of the organization or in a team with admin-level permissions), clicking “Fork” on any repository will ask where to fork it to:

Similarly, if a member of your organization forks one of your organization’s repositories that fork will be considered part of the repository and can be added to teams. This is not unlike the way forking private repositories works with personal accounts, just much more flexible and powerful.

Open Source ready

Just like personal accounts, organizations are completely free for open source.

Check out MongoDB and RubyGems for two open source organizations.

Transforming an existing user account into an organization

Is your company or open source project using a shared GitHub account? Converting it to an organization is cake.

Log in one final time and click Manage Organizations in the Switch Context dropdown on your dashboard. Here you can turn your shared user account into an organization. Just click the button and follow the instructions.

Pricing

With Organizations we’ve simplified our plans structure.

Personal accounts can continue to choose from the Free, Micro, Small, and Medium plans. The Large, Mega, and Giga plans will no longer be available. If you’re currently using one of these plans, don’t worry — you’ve been grandfathered in. However, If you want to take advantage of the new organizations features, you’ll need to upgrade to an Organization plan.

Organizations can choose from the Free, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum plans. Organizations have no team limits, member limits, or collaborators – the only thing that matters is the number of private repositories. Public repositories, as always, are free.

Take a look at our new plans structure.

Get started with Organizations today

Join Engine Yard, Shopify, Efficiency 2.0, GitHub, and other companies by switching to an organization today. We hope they’ll give you and your team more time to focus on what matters most – the code!

Create a new organization now!

Updated Pricing

We’ve released more affordable Organizations for Small Businesses.

Written by

Kyle Neath

@kneath