Allow Adding Outside Collaborators to Organization Teams

[equita-dpeveroni]

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Product Feedback

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Summary:
Currently, GitHub organizations cannot add outside collaborators to teams. Teams are restricted to organization members only. This limitation makes it difficult to manage permissions for external contributors who need access to multiple repositories.

Use Case:
As an organization administrator, I often work with external contractors and contributors who are not full members of our organization. Managing their access on a per-repository basis is cumbersome, especially when several outside collaborators require identical permissions across multiple repositories.
If I could add outside collaborators to teams, I would be able to:

• Grant and manage repository access for groups of external contributors in a centralized and scalable way.
• Apply team-based permission changes and CODEOWNERS management to outside collaborators, just like internal members.
• Improve auditability and permission hygiene by grouping all related collaborators in a single team.

Current Workarounds:

• Manually adding each outside collaborator to each repository, which is error-prone and time-consuming.
• Creating organization accounts for external contributors, which is not always feasible or desired.

Suggested Solution:
Allow outside collaborators to be added to organization teams.

• When an outside collaborator is added to a team, they would receive the same repository access as team members, but would not gain other organization member privileges.
• This functionality would greatly improve permission management for organizations working with external contributors.

Impact:
This feature would streamline access control, reduce administrative overhead, and provide a better experience for organizations collaborating with people outside their core team.

Related documentation:

• About teams
• Adding outside collaborators to repositories

Thank you for considering this request!

[github-actions[bot]]

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