I love GitHub and use it daily. So much so that I built an App for it. GitHub has changed the way the world creates software forever. If GitHub were to grant me one feature request today, I would ask for Organizational Wikis.
Origins
I can remember back to 2009 and a conversation I had with a colleague at the time about whether or not we were going to use Git or Mercurial. While both were similar, my argument for Git was that I thought this GitHub thing would really take off and it was already showing strong signs in the Ruby community. Fast forward 4+ years later and as they say, “the rest is history.”
A little background
If you are unfamiliar with GitHub’s organizations feature, then take a look at this blog post when it was announced a little over three years ago.
TLDR: GitHub Organizations allows users to create a group that houses code under one banner. If you work on a product for a company, your company would have an organization in GitHub and all of your code would exist under it. Members of your company would belong to this organization and have access based on rights that you can associate with teams.
When this feature was announced it was a game changer, not only for GitHub but for its users.
Organizational Wikis
Soon after the birth of organizations on GitHub, I found myself wanting to house a bunch of information about our company and how we do things in a wiki. Wikis work great for this sort of thing, anyone can edit and the information just flows. The only problem is, right now GitHub only allows wikis to be created for a repository.
Wouldn’t it be great to point a new hire to your rganization’s wiki GitHub for them to get up to speed? Imagine all of the information on how to setup their computer, to company policies, videos, rake setup for projects, etc.
Instead of having this information fragmented across your repositories, filing cabinets, dropbox, the information would be centralized.
Workarounds
Absent this feature, one thing I have done in the past is create a repository on GitHub that is dedicated to this information and inside of it start your wiki there. While it is not the full blown feature, it is a workaround that will make the spirit of the feature work today.
Just a start
I think there is a lot that GitHub could do for organizations and this is just one idea. I think the ground here is still fresh and ready to be broken. Your organization inside of GitHub could be “hub” for everything your company does as it related to building software and one step towards this would be organizational wikis.
What are you thoughts? Good idea? Bad idea? How would you improve it? Leave a comment and let me know.