Over the last three years, I have successfully run github.com/ibm with a couple of cohorts as one of those “20%” responsibility jobs. IBM has one of the most prominent instances of a free-tier GitHub organization in the world, and dealing with this scale with such a small team has some unique challenges.
In this talk, I’ll introduce and discuss dealing with some interesting organic growth, what to do when the horse has already left the barn, and you’re attempting to corral the internal community, and how you can tend your garden (organization) without going crazy. My goal is to show you some of the ridiculous scale issues that IBM has to deal with so you can learn and prepare to maintain your organization at your scale and understand how you can defend against issues that all public GitHub organizations will eventually run into.