# Stewardship

> How inspect.software measures who stands behind a repository — organization vs. personal ownership, verified domain, reach, and track record. 6% of the index.


**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](/wiki/sustainability-governance) (25% within category)
- **Weight in overall index:** 6.0%
- **Metric key:** `stewardship`
- **`null`** when 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](/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](/wiki/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](/wiki/organization-assessment) when the org
  itself is inspected.

Related: [organization assessment](/wiki/organization-assessment) ·
[Sustainability & Governance](/wiki/sustainability-governance)