Collaborating with maintainers using discussions

You can contribute to the goals, plans, health, and community for a project on GitHub by communicating with the maintainers of the project in a discussion.

Who can use this feature?

People with read access to a repository can start and participate in discussions and polls in the repository. People with read access to the source repository for organization discussions can start and participate in discussions and polls in the organization.

In this article

About collaboration with maintainers using GitHub Discussions

GitHub Discussions is an open forum for conversation among maintainers and the community for a repository or organization on GitHub. If you use or contribute to a project, you can start a discussion to make suggestions and engage with maintainers and community members about your plans, questions, ideas, and feedback. For more information, see About discussions.

All discussions must be created in a category. For repository discussions, people with maintain or admin permissions to the repository define the categories for discussions in that repository. For organization discussions, people with maintain or admin permissions to the source repository define the categories for discussions in that organization. Each category has a format: open-ended discussion, question and answer, or announcement. Maintainers can use categories with the announcement format to share information, releases, or events. To keep discussions in these categories focused on important updates, only people with maintain or admin permissions can create new discussions, but anyone can comment and reply.

Repository administrators and project maintainers can delete a discussion in that repository. Similarly, administrators and maintainers of the source repository for an organization's discussions can delete a discussion in that organization. For more information, see Managing discussions.

GitHub will automatically recognize community members who contribute the most comments marked as answers to discussions with a question/answer format. These members appear in a list of the most helpful contributors to the project's discussions, if their privacy settings allow. For more information, see Setting your profile to private.

As your project grows, you can grant higher access permissions to active members of your community. For more information, see Granting higher permissions to top contributors.

Screenshot of the "Discussions" page in a repository. The "Most helpful" section is outlined in dark orange.

Community members can upvote discussions and top-level comments inside discussions to communicate with maintainers about ideas that matter to them. Project maintainers can then sort discussions and comments based on upvotes to gain insight into what community members value.

For more information about participation in discussions, see Participating in a discussion.

Tip

You can also use Copilot Chat to generate ideas, outlines, or drafts for discussions, based on your pull requests and issues. See Writing discussions or blog posts.

Prerequisites

To collaborate with maintainers in repository discussions, a repository administrator or project maintainer must enable GitHub Discussions for the repository. For more information, see Enabling or disabling GitHub Discussions for a repository.

To collaborate with maintainers in organization discussions, GitHub Discussions must be enabled for the organization. For more information, see Enabling or disabling GitHub Discussions for an organization.

Starting a discussion

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository or organization where you want to start a discussion.

  2. Under your repository or organization name, click Discussions.

    Screenshot of the tabs in a GitHub repository. The "Discussions" option is outlined in dark orange.