What is This Tool For?
Large companies often have many official GitHub organizations (aka accounts) that aren't centrally listed anywhere, nor have they verified their association with the parent company's domain. This tool helps you discover and validate these scattered accounts yourself, by finding hidden connections between them, making it easier to see a company's full open-source footprint.
IMPORTANT: This is NOT a magic, fully automatic tool. It's meant to make it easier to MANUALLY find and verify authenticity of accounts that may have a company's name in it. The list of search results is NOT meant to be a list of associated accounts.
How It Works
This tool helps you find relationships between GitHub organizations using the following concepts:
- Parent Organization: This is basically the anchor point: A known, official account for the company you are researching (e.g.,
microsoft). You provide this as a starting point for comparison.
- Search Term: The tool will do a GitHub search for accounts that simply contain this text. This assumes that most accounts associated with a company contain that company's name.
- Search Term: The tool will do a GitHub search for accounts that simply contain this text. This assumes that most accounts associated with a company contain that company’s name.
- Shared Members - Parent: A search result organization is marked as sharing members with the Parent if it has at least one “member” in common with the main parent organization you specified. Members must be invited by the organization and typically only includes employees and such. This could be a strong indicator of an official relationship.
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Shared Members - Associated: This is a secondary check that works by:
- First, identifying a pool of "trusted" organizations from your results. These are organizations that have a verified domain on GitHub, whose verified domains match the parent organization's (or other domains you manually select as being known associated with the parent company, but might not be one of the parent account’s verified domains.)
- Like the shared "Parent" member check, all accounts are checked if they have any members in common with these other organizations that aren't the parent account, but are verified as associated with the parent company's known domains.
Notes & Tips:
- The “domains” column lists only what web link or email domain is listed on the profile, which should NOT be assumed to be an official association unless confirmed by the “domain verified” column. Anyone can list any web link they want on the profile, it does not mean it’s an official account. You’ll still need to verify the association manually yourself. But it may help find accounts that are more likely to be official.
- Because the accounts list is fetched via a simple search by name, this is NOT some magic tool to find all associated accounts with a company. If the company has official accounts that don’t include the search term, those won’t be found. Likewise, there are accounts that may contain the search term but have absolutely nothing to do with the company.