Members of Cardinal Cloud GitHub organizations have two options for collaborating with people who are not affiliated with Stanford.
- Organization Member: To add a non-affiliated user as a member of an organization so they have member privileges and can be added to teams, you will need to sponsor a SUNet ID for the individual. This can be a free (base) or full sponsorship. When their sponsored SUNet ID expires, they will no longer be able to access the University-related code projects as a member. Additionally, Org Administrators can add sponsored SUNet IDs to your project-related workgroups, manage via Workgroup Manager, and synchronize with GitHub Teams.
- Outside Collaborator: You may add any public GitHub username as a collaborator with specific permissions at the repository level. These users are not members of the organization, do not have privileges beyond the specific repositories, and cannot be added to teams.
Note: Organization Admins are responsible for managing the provisioning and de-provisioning of licenses for outside collaborators.
Organization Member
If the intended collaborator has a sponsored SUNet ID but doesn’t have a GitHub account, the quickest way is to have them log into GitHub and create one in advance. Then, the organization admin can send the invitation to their GitHub username (see above).
If the org admin sends the invitation to a functional Stanford email address, the user will be redirected to GitHub to first create a personal account, then accept the invitation and join the organization.
Remember, email services are not included with free (base) sponsored SUNet IDs. Therefore, if the org admin sends an email invitation to [sponsored-sunetid]@stanford.edu, for example, the invitation message will bounce.
Outside Collaborators
Organization administrators can invite someone with a pre-existing personal GitHub account to collaborate on the associated projects. Use the invite function to search for the person’s GitHub username and send them an invitation.
The user will first need a SUNet ID to authenticate through Stanford to accept the invitation and join the organization. Therefore, a University affiliate will need to sponsor a SUNet ID (free (base) is acceptable) and add the user to the workgroup associated with the organization via Workgroup Manager.
Once sponsorship ends, the organization administrator must manually remove the user to terminate their access to Stanford projects. Note that it may take some time for newly sponsored SUNet IDs and any updated workgroups to synchronize across on-premise and cloud directories before functioning with GitHub.
Special Notice: To authenticate via Stanford’s Microsoft Single Sign-On interface, free (base) sponsored SUNet IDs will need to append @stanford.edu to their ID as the username. Email services are not included with free (base) sponsored SUNet IDs and are not necessary to join a GitHub organization. Appending @stanford.edu serves only to direct Microsoft to use Stanford’s authentication process.
Invite Collaborators via Email
Follow the steps below to invite outside collaborators who don’t have a SUNet ID:
- Go to the repository on GitHub.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Select Manage access from the left sidebar.
- Click Invite a collaborator.
- Type the collaborator’s GitHub username or email address.
- Choose their role and click Add or Send Invitation.
- The collaborator will receive an email to accept the invitation.
