Creating and Accessing GitHub Accounts and Organizations

There are three types of accounts in GitHub: Personal, Enterprise, and Organizations.

Personal account

A personal GitHub account is for individuals developing their own AVAnnotate project. It’s where you host projects you’re working on alone or where you’re the primary maintainer. Repositories created under your personal account are tied to your username (e.g., github.com/”yourname”/AVAnnotateproject). This is ideal for individual projects or anything not requiring shared ownership or administrative roles.

Some scenarious that may best suit a personal account include:

  • A private audio file and annotations only available to the owner
  • Personal archive of video files that don’t require collaboration
  • A dissertation project with audiovisual files and transcripts

Organization account

An organization account is designed for collaboration. It allows multiple users to contribute to and manage AVAnnotate projects under a shared group identity. Organizations work best for collaborative class assignments, student groups, library staff, or departments that need to control access, assign roles (e.g., admin, maintainer, contributor). AVAnnotate projects created here belong to the organization, not to a single person.

GitHub organizations “are shared accounts where businesses and open-source projects can collaborate across many projects at once, with sophisticated security and administrative features.” For AVAnnotate projects, a class could be an “organization” or a research team or library might have a shared GitHub account.

Some scenarious that may best suit a organization account include:

  • Library-wide project using AVAnnotate to tag and transcribe oral histories
  • Collaborative annotation of ethnographic interviews for a class project
  • Departmental initiative to build a shared AVAnnotate project for research use

Enterprise account

An enterprise account is for large-scale, often institution-level use. Currently, enterprise accounts do not work in AVAnnotate.

There are three steps to using new accounts and organizations in an AVAnnotate project:

  1. Create a new GitHub personal account or GitHub organization.
  2. Give AVAnnotate permission to access the organization.
  3. AVAnnotate users will need to re-Login to the AVAnnotate in order to see the new organization or account in the AVAnnotate Dashboard.