Cross-enterprise organization membership: allow org invites to reference an external @org/team

[wallentx]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Other

Body

Context

We are collaborating with an external partner that has its own GitHub Enterprise Cloud
account. On our side we created a bespoke organization for the joint work, with teams and
child teams to drive repo access and role assignment, and we want to invite the partner's
people into that org rather than granting access repo by repo.

GitHub Support confirmed there is no supported way to do this across enterprises and
pointed me here.

The problems

Enterprise Managed Users can block it entirely. Per the
documented restrictions,
a managed user "cannot be invited to organizations or repositories outside of the
enterprise, or to other enterprises." If the partner uses EMU, its people can neither join
our org nor be added as outside collaborators. If the host uses EMU, external people must
be provisioned in the host IdP, which a real third party will not be. Either way the only
supported workaround disappears, and there is no way to discover the other side's
configuration short of attempting an invite and watching it fail.

The perverse result: the more rigorously either enterprise governs identity, the less able
it is to collaborate. What remains is partner staff using personal GitHub accounts, which
puts the work outside both enterprises' provisioning and audit and leaves offboarding to
goodwill.

The invite has no concept of the other enterprise. One username or email at a time, no
way to invite a team as a unit, and nothing keeps membership in sync when someone joins or
leaves on their side. Our team structure governs nothing about who arrives.

Double licensing. Each invited member consumes a seat on our enterprise even though
their employer already pays for Enterprise Cloud, which turns "who hosts the repos" into a
budget negotiation instead of a technical decision.

internal visibility does not help, since it stops at the enterprise boundary, which is
exactly the boundary in question.

The ask

Let an organization invite reference an external enterprise's principals:

• Invite @partner-org/team (or @partner-org/user) into our org, optionally mapped onto
  one of our teams, so their joiners and leavers propagate automatically.
• Mutual consent: an enterprise owner on each side approves the link, and either side can
  revoke it, removing access for everyone at once.
• Invited users keep their home identity and home license, authenticating through their own
  enterprise's SSO, with actions in both audit logs. This should work for managed user
  accounts, since the point is that identity stays owned by the home enterprise.
• Access inside our org stays governed by our roles and teams.

If only part of this is feasible, the @org/team invite with mutual consent and
home-license retention is what matters most. Team granularity and EMU support are what make
it usable rather than just cheaper.

Without something like this, the alternatives teams reach for are shared machine accounts,
mirrored repos, source drops over email or object storage, or moving the work off GitHub.

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