Stewardship examines who stands behind a repository. Ownership is a governance fact with long-term consequences: an organization signals shared, accountable stewardship that can outlive any single person, while a personal-account project — however excellent — carries the continuity risk of its one owner.
This is the one place in the methodology where organization backing deliberately influences the health index, and the lift is documented to the point.
- Category: Sustainability & Governance (25% within category)
- Weight in overall index: 6.0%
- Metric key:
stewardship nullwhen the owner profile is unavailable
How the value is computed
| Component | Weight | Criteria |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership backing | 30 | organization → 30 pts, personal (user) account → 10 |
| Verified domain | 20 | organization with a verified domain → 20, without → 0; excluded for personal accounts |
| Owner reach | 25 | followers of the owning account, log-scaled — ~3,000 saturates |
| Track record | 25 | account age (≥6 years → 12 pts) + public repositories (log-scaled → 13 pts) |
For personal accounts the verified-domain component is excluded and weights renormalize — a person is not penalized for a check that cannot apply to them. The remaining gap is the ownership-backing margin itself.
The organization lift, made explicit
A repository moved from a personal account to an organization gains up to 20 points of backing plus access to the verified-domain component. Worked through the weights, that is the difference between a moderate and a good governance profile for many projects — a deliberate, transparent preference for structures that survive their founders. The full arithmetic is in the methodology.
Reading the result
- Verified domains bind identity. An organization that verified its domain has proven control of a real-world identity — meaningful supply-chain evidence, not decoration.
- Reach and track record are secondary. They add texture (an established account with history versus a fresh one) but cannot substitute for the structural components.
- The owner profile also records GitHub's self-published location alongside name, company, website, and avatar. Location is evidence for identity resolution only and does not affect the stewardship score.
- Stewardship measures the owner, not the code — read alongside maintainer resilience, which measures the people doing the work.
Improving the value
- Move flagship projects from personal accounts into a GitHub organization.
- Verify the organization's domain in GitHub settings.
- Maintain a complete organization profile — it also feeds the organization assessment when the org itself is inspected.
Related: organization assessment · Sustainability & Governance