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Collaborating with Externals on Documents

Purpose and scope

We collaborate with external organisations on written documents using a shared Git repository on GitHub. This gives us version history, reviews and clean diffs on prose — and lets partners contribute directly.

Scope: documents only

This applies to documents, not source code. All development stays on GitLab, with every control, pipeline and release unchanged. Nothing about how we code changes.

The plan

We use the GitHub Free plan. On private repositories it does not enforce branch protection or required reviews, so treat reviews as good practice, not a hard gate.

Setting up your account (employees)

A one-time setup so your GitHub account is linked to Partisia and secure.

  1. Use one GitHub account. If you already have one, use it — no need for a separate account. Otherwise create a free account at github.com.
  2. Add your Partisia email. Settings → Emails → Add email address → you@partisia.com, then click the verification link GitHub sends. (You can keep a personal email on the account too — an account can have several.)
  3. Enable two-factor authentication (2FA). Required in our organisation. Settings → Password and authentication → enable 2FA with an authenticator app, and store your recovery codes safely.
  4. Point your commits at your Partisia email. Set you@partisia.com as your commit email under Settings → Emails, and locally: 
    git config --global user.email "you@partisia.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
  5. Accept your invite to the organisation or repository (sent to your @partisia.com address).

Adding external collaborators (for repo owners)

  • Invite each partner as an outside collaborator on the specific repository — never to organisation-wide teams. This scopes their access to that one repo.
  • Give Write (can push branches and open pull requests) or Read/Triage for comment-only access.
  • Keep secrets and regulated data out of partner-shared repositories.
  • Offboarding is simply removing the collaborator when the engagement ends.

Organisation settings

Managed by organisation owners (a small, trusted set):

  • Verify the partisia.com domain and restrict organisation email notifications to it.
  • Require 2FA organisation-wide.

Access is controlled through organisation/repository membership — not by owning individual accounts. Enforced, company-owned identities require GitHub Enterprise and are out of scope for document collaboration.