Is an organisation on GitHub a user or just a repositories container that needs a user?

Question

As GitHub user I can create an organization. What i don't understand -- Is an organisation independent?

• Is it a repositories container, that needs a (user) account it belongs to or
• is it for itself an (organization) account GitHub user (and doesn't need any personal user account)? Is it then correct to say, that an organization is a "featured user" account -- an account with all the features of a personal user account (especially code management, commenting etc.) and some additional functionality?

Answer 1

The biggest difference between user accounts and organizations is team-based permissions for the repositories owned by the organization.

This means you can have team members under your organization and let them interact more aggressively with your repositories compared to plain contributors.

I'd say the concept of a GitHub organization is pretty independent from a plain GitHub user - they aren't the same thing. See for example how you can convert a user to an organization https://help.github.com/articles/converting-a-user-into-an-organization/

With that being said, organizations have what they call owners. You can have multiple owners (i.e you can invite people to be owner of your organization along with you) but an organization cannot have zero owner.

For example, when you create an organization while logged under your account, the default first owner of the organization you just created is yourself.

Here's a more detailed list about the differences between a user and an organization https://help.github.com/articles/what-s-the-difference-between-user-and-organization-accounts/

Answer 2

An organization is not a user, it doesn't have a password and you cannot log into an organization like you can to a personal/user account. But an organization can own repositories, which can be made accessible to actual persons/users who have passwords and can login.