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GitHub Organization Access

The Civic Tech DC GitHub Organization is where most projects store their code. In keeping with our open source tenet, most repositories are public, but write, maintain, and admin access is restricted to each project’s maintainers.

How you get access depends on how involved you are with a project. There are three roles, and the rest of this page covers how to set things up for each.

RoleAccessWho it’s for
Initial ContributorNo special access; contributes via forks and pull requestsFirst-time and occasional contributors
MaintainerWrite access, via the project’s GitHub TeamRegular contributors on the project
AdminFull admin control of the repositoriesProject leads (keep at least 2)

If you’re contributing for the first time, you don’t need any special access. Fork the repository and open a pull request from your fork back to the main repository. A maintainer will review it from there.

Regular contributors are added to a GitHub Team for the project (what counts as a maintainer varies by project). Everyone on the team gets at least write access to the project’s repositories, so they can push branches and merge approved pull requests.

Admins have full control of a repository, including managing access and settings. These are usually the project leads.


Contact @Evan Tung on Slack to create a team. The GitHub team name will match your project name unless you specifically request otherwise.

Contact @Evan Tung on Slack to create a repository, and include the repository name you’d like. You’ll be made an Admin of the new repository, from which you can add another Admin and grant the project’s GitHub team access.

Any Admin of the project’s GitHub team can add a new Maintainer. In GitHub, go to the Civic Tech DC Organization → Teams → your team, then click “Add a Member.”

Leaving a project you help maintain? Before you go, assign another Admin on every repository you’re an Admin of. That way each repository keeps at least 2 Admins and the project never loses access.