/welcome

Information on joining the government community — a collaborative community for sharing best practices in furtherance of open source, open data, and open government efforts.

Government community on GitHub

Welcome to the government community on GitHub, a collaborative community for sharing best practices in furtherance of open source, open data, and open government efforts. To encourage open dialog, the community is a semi-private community, with only government employees having access.

Who's eligible?

Anyone with a government email address is encouraged to participate, including national/federal, state, local, and municipal employees. That means if your email ends in .gov, .gov.uk, ci.champaign.il.us, etc., you are eligible. Also, you need to be human. Agency accounts and robots need not apply.

If you're curious, the constantly updated list of approved domains is available as part of the GMan open source project.

How to join

In order to join the community, we must first confirm that you are, in fact, a government employee:

  1. If you don't already have one, sign up for a GitHub account. GitHub accounts should be personal to you. Human-sounding names like @benbalter are preferred over organization-specific names like @benbalter_abc_agency.

  2. Ensure that your government email is associated with your account. If you already have a GitHub account, you can simply add your government email address to your account.

  3. Confirm your government email address.

  4. Visit government-community.githubapp.com in your web browser.

  5. You should be automatically added and redirected to the GitHub Government community. You now have access to and can participate in the discussions available at github.com/government.

Questions

If you have any questions or have trouble confirming your identity above, please email government@github.com.