How University of Minnesota uses GitHub

Hero image for the story: University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota built a "social network for collaborating on code" with GitHub to support research, education, and outreach across its five campuses and 1,300+ IT professionals serving 60,000 students and 20,000 faculty and staff members.

Overview

Industry: Education
Location: Minnesota, USA
Students: 60,000+

Why GitHub

The University's distributed IT model—with professionals spread across 230 departments and administrative units—required an effective tool for cross-department collaboration. A group of developers called Code-People saw the value in GitHub and worked to make it available campus-wide, eventually demonstrating its business value to become a common-good service.

Peter Walz, a system engineer at the University, noted that the team appreciated GitHub's features—pull requests, issues, wikis, and other collaboration tools—along with favorable pricing. "With the help of Git, we're seeing faster code pushes and pulls. We also take advantage of GitHub's collaboration tools, for both code and the processes (such as issue tracking) and documentation needed around the code."

Uses across campus

GitHub serves a variety of users at the University:

Students in computer science classes
Programmers working on various tools and projects
System administrators storing configuration files and deployment recipes
Designers managing Drupal site data

GitHub's university licensing option allows students, student-facing faculty, academic non-profit researchers, and other University members to use the platform while keeping administration simple. The University uses a script for Computer Science instructors that automatically sets up repositories, teams, and permissions for classes given a token, organization, and student list.

Impact by the numbers

6,200 total GitHub users since 2012
1,700 active users
60 class-related organizations set up in the past calendar year

Workflow improvements

University of Minnesota

Pull requests have significantly improved workflows by allowing teams to easily see and discuss changes before they're merged. "You can also comment on individual lines, which makes it much easier to discuss what's going on," Walz said. This replaced previous email-based commit notifications that often weren't relevant to individual team members' work. Code Review facilitates conversation around projects without inbox spam.

GitHub also reduced IT administration time by enabling users to set permissions and self-service on support issues. "The ability for people to fix their own repository issues is huge—it saves a large amount of staff time on the IT administration side." The platform integrates with commonly-used tools at the University including Slack, Travis, HipChat, and Waffle.io.

Advantages of Git and GitHub

For teams transitioning from other version control systems, Git's model offers distinct benefits. Having a complete offline copy of a repository means work can continue without connectivity, with commits pushed when connection is restored. Granular permissions and team-level control over access settings give departments flexibility.

"If I had to describe what GitHub's done for us in a few words, I'd say: simplified cross-departmental collaboration," Walz reflected. The University's flexible, collaborative culture—willing to take an open-source approach and driven by community demand rather than competition between departments—has made GitHub the tool of choice, with groups like Code-People and DevOps delivering talks and sharing knowledge across the institution.